Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

cnbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 383 posts

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#51

Post by uneekname »

valbaca wrote: post #40
uneekname wrote: post #27

As someone who doesn't really follow the LLM space closely, I have been consistently turning to Anthropic when I want to use an LLM (usually to work through coding problems) Beside Sonnet impressing me, I like Anthropic because there's less of an "icky" factor compared to OpenAI or even Google. I don't know how much better Anthropic actually is, but I don't think I'm the only one who chooses based on my perception of…

> or even Google > Last year, Google committed to invest $2 billion in Anthropic, after previously confirming it had taken a 10% stake in the startup alongside a large cloud contract between the two companies.

Well, there you go. These companies are always closer than they seem at first glance, and my preference for Anthropic may just be patting myself on the back.

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#52

Post by surgical_fire »

whatshisface wrote: post #33
raverbashing wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but Amazon is not making extra money with you being their biggest customer With Anthropic yes

Anthropic is getting $4B in investment in a year where their revenue was about $850M. Even if Amazon had bought them outright for that much, they would not be ahead. The fact that everybody keeps repeating the claim that Amazon is "making money" makes this appear like some kind of scam.

It appears to be a scam because it sort of is.

AI needs to be propped up because the bug tech cloud providers they depend on need AI to be a thing to justify their valuations. Tech is going through a bit of a slump where all things being hyped a few years ago sort of died down (crypto? VR? Voice assistants? Metaverse?). Nobody gets very hyped about any of those nowadays. I am probably forgetting a couple of hyped things that fizzled out over the years.

Case in point, as much as I despise Apple, they are not all-in the AI bandwagon because it does nothing for them.

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#53

Post by rafark »

uneekname wrote: post #51
valbaca wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> or even Google > Last year, Google committed to invest $2 billion in Anthropic, after previously confirming it had taken a 10% stake in the startup alongside a large cloud contract between the two companies.

Well, there you go. These companies are always closer than they seem at first glance, and my preference for Anthropic may just be patting myself on the back.

But why though? Claude is REALLY good at programming. I love it

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#54

Post by cainxinth »

They certainly need the money. The Pro service has been running in limited mode all week due to being over capacity. It defaults to “concise” mode during high capacity but Pro users can select to put it back into “Full Response.” But I can tell the quality drops even when you do that, and it fails and brings up error messages more commonly. They don’t have enough compute to go around.

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#55

Post by vineyardmike »

whatshisface wrote: post #33
raverbashing wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but Amazon is not making extra money with you being their biggest customer With Anthropic yes

Anthropic is getting $4B in investment in a year where their revenue was about $850M. Even if Amazon had bought them outright for that much, they would not be ahead. The fact that everybody keeps repeating the claim that Amazon is "making money" makes this appear like some kind of scam.

These sort of investments usually also contain licensing deals.

Amazon probably gets Anthropic models they can resell “for free”. The 850M revenue is Anthropic’s, but there is incremental additional revenue to AWS’s hosted model services. AWS was already doing lots of things with Anthropic models, and this may alter the terms more in amazons favor.

Are they actually making money? I don’t know, investments aren’t usually profitable on day one. Is this an opportunity for more AWS revenue in the future? Probably.

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#56

Post by mef »

swyx wrote: post #10
maxclark wrote: post #4

Is this really a $4B investment, or credits on AWS? AWS margins are close to 40%, so the real cost of this "investment" would be way less than the press release.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/22/anthropic-raises-an-additi... > "This new CASH infusion brings Amazon’s total investment in Anthropic to $8 billion while maintaining the tech giant’s position as a minority investor, Anthropic said."

whether cash or credit, it's all going right back to AWS

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#57

Post by fullstackwife »

peppertree wrote: post #37

Anthropic should double down on the strategy of being the better code generator. No I don't need an AI agent to call the restaurant for me. Win the developers over and the rest will follow.

I also don't understand the idea of voice mode, or agent controller computer. Maybe it is cool to see as a tech demo, but all I really want is good quality, at reasonable price for the LLM service

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#58

Post by vineyardmike »

surgical_fire wrote: post #52
whatshisface wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anthropic is getting $4B in investment in a year where their revenue was about $850M. Even if Amazon had bought them outright for that much, they would not be ahead. The fact that everybody keeps repeating the claim that Amazon is "making money" makes this appear like some kind of scam.

It appears to be a scam because it sort of is. AI needs to be propped up because the bug tech cloud providers they depend on need AI to be a thing to justify their valuations. Tech is going through a bit of a slump where all things being hyped a few years ago sort of died down (crypto? VR? Voice assistants? Metaverse?). Nobody gets very hyped about any of those nowadays. I am probably forgetting a couple of hyped thi…

Go look at earnings reports for big tech companies. AI is definitely driving incremental revenue.

Apple is definitely on the AI bandwagon, they just have a different business model and they’re very disciplined. Apple tends not to increase research and investment costs faster than revenue growth. You’ll also notice rumors that they’re lowering their self driving car and VR research goals.

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#60

Post by staticman2 »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #45
noirbot wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, even if they're practically as bad, there's value in not having someone like Altman who's out there saying things about how many jobs he's excited to make obsolete and how much of the creative work of the world is worthless.

I don’t think he ever said or even implied any percentage of ‘creative work of the world is worthless’? A lot less valuable then what artists may have desired or aspired to at the time of creation, sure, but definitely with some value.

Doesn't he basically troll people on Twitter constantly?
Post reply on HN