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Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

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Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#81

Post by nowahe »

cainxinth wrote: post #54

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.

I've had it refuse to generate a long text response (I was trying to concise a 300kb documentation to 20-30kb to be able to put it in the project's context), and every time I asked it replied "How should structure the results ?", "Shall I go ahead with writing the artifacts now ?", etc.

It wasn't even during the over-capacity event I don't think, and I'm a pro user.

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#82

Post by herval »

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…

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

not sure if you've been paying attention, but AI is literally _the only thing_ Apple talks about these days. They literally released _an entire generation of devices_ where the only new thing is "Apple Intelligence"

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#83

Post by derefr »

mossTechnician wrote: post #43
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…

Personally, I find companies with names like "Anthropic" to be inherently icky too. Anthropic means "human," and if a company must remind me it is made of/by/for humans, it always feels less so. E.g. The Browser Company of New York is a group of friendly humans... Second, generative AI is machine generated; if there's any "making" of the training content, Anthropic didn't do it. Kind of like how OpenAI isn't open, th…

> Anthropic means "human," and if a company must remind me it is made of/by/for humans

Why do you think that that's their intended reading? I had assumed the name was implying "we're going to be an AGI company eventually; we want to make AI that acts like a human."

> if there's any "making" of the training content, Anthropic didn't do it

This is incorrect. First-gen LLM base models were made largely of raw Internet text corpus, but since then all the improvements have been from:

• careful training data curation, using data-science tools (or LLMs!) to scan the training-data corpus for various kinds of noise or bias, and prune it out — this is "making" in the sense of "making a cut of a movie";

• synthesis of training data using existing LLMs, with careful prompting, and non-ML pre/post-processing steps — this is "making" in the sense of "making a song on a synthesizer";

• Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) — this is "making" in the sense of "noticing when the model is being dumb in practice" [from explicit feedback UX, async sentiment analysis of user responses in chat conversations, etc] and then converting those into weights on existing training data + additional synthesized "don't do this" training data.

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#84

Post by htrp »

neya wrote: post #80
cainxinth wrote: post #54

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.

I am a paying customer with credits and the API endpoints rate-limited me to the point where it's actually unusable as a coding assistant. I use a VS Code extension and it just bailed out in the middle of a migration. I had to revert everything it changed and that was not a pleasant experience, sadly.

Control your own inference endpoints.

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#85

Post by square_usual »

neya wrote: post #80
cainxinth wrote: post #54

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.

I am a paying customer with credits and the API endpoints rate-limited me to the point where it's actually unusable as a coding assistant. I use a VS Code extension and it just bailed out in the middle of a migration. I had to revert everything it changed and that was not a pleasant experience, sadly.

When working with AI coding tools commit early, commit often becomes essential advice. I like that aider makes every change its own commit. I can always manicure the commit history later, I'd rather not lose anything when the AI can make destructive changes to code.

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#86

Post by square_usual »

petesergeant wrote: post #72
loandbehold wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claude is the best model for programming. New generation of code tools like Cursor all use Claude as the main model.

> Claude is the best model for programming This week.

It has held this position since at least June. The Aider LLM leaderboards [1] have the Sonnet 3.5 June version beating 4o handily. Only o1-preview beat it narrowly, but IIRC at much higher costs. Sonnet 3.5 October has taken the lead again by a wide margin.

1: https://aider.chat/docs/leaderboards/

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#87

Post by staticman2 »

herval wrote: post #82
surgical_fire wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Case in point, as much as I despise Apple, they are not all-in the AI bandwagon because it does nothing for them. not sure if you've been paying attention, but AI is literally _the only thing_ Apple talks about these days. They literally released _an entire generation of devices_ where the only new thing is "Apple Intelligence"

Is Apple investing in AI as much as Google, Meta, Microsoft, and xAI? If not they are not "all in".

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#88

Post by hiq »

staticman2 wrote: post #73
rtsil wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Win the developers over and the rest will follow. Will they really? Anecdotal evidence, but nobody I know in real life knows about Claude (other than it's an ordinary first name). And they all use or at least know about ChatGPT. None of them are software engineers of course. But the corporate deciders aren't software engineers either.

Most people I know in real life have certainly heard of ChatGPT but don't pay for it. I think someone enthusiastic enough to pay for the subscription is more likely to be willing to try a rival service, but that's not most people. Usually when these services are ready to grow they offer a month or more free to try, at least that's what Google has been doing with their Gemini bundle.

I'm actually baffled by the number of people I've met who pay for such services, when I can't tell the difference between the models available within one service, or between one service or the other (at least not consistently).

I do use them everyday, but there's no way I'd pay $20/month for something like that as long as I can easily jump from one to the other. There's no guarantee that my premium account on $X is or will remain better than a free account on $Y, so committing to anything seems pointless.

I do wonder though: several services started adding "memories" (chunks of information retained from previous interactions), making future interactions more relevant. Some users are very careful about what they feed recommendation algorithms to ensure they keep enjoying the content they get (another behavior I'm was surprised by), so maybe they also value this personalization enough to focus on one specific LLM service.

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#89

Post by iLemming »

petesergeant wrote: post #72
loandbehold wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claude is the best model for programming. New generation of code tools like Cursor all use Claude as the main model.

> Claude is the best model for programming This week.

Anecdotally, Claude seems to hallucinate more during certain hours. It's amusing to watch, almost like your dog that gets too bored and stops responding to your commands - you say "sit" and he looks at you, tilts his head, looks straight up at you, almost like saying "I know what you're saying..." but then decides to run to another room and bring his toy.

And you'd be wondering: "darn, where's that toughest, most obidient and smart Belgian malinois that just a few hour ago was ready to take down a Bin Laden?"

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#90

Post by chatmasta »

mikeocool wrote: post #5

Curious if anyone knows the logistics of these cloud provider/AI company deals. In this case, it seems like the terms of the deal mean that Anthropic ends up spending most of the investment on AWS to pay for training. Does anthropic basically get at cost pricing on AWS? If Amazon has any margin on their pricing, it seems like this $4B investment ends up costing them a lot less, and this is a nice way to turn a cap ex…

Supermicro is currently under DOJ investigation for similar schemes to this. The legality of it probably depends on the accounting, and how revenue is recognized, etc.

It certainly looks sketchy. But I’m sure there’s a way to do it legitimately if their accountants and lawyers are careful about it…

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