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Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

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Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#92
post #44

Rival? They kick you out after a few messages and ask you to come back later. Gpt doesn't do that

Anecdotal experience, but as far as I've played around with them, Claude's models have given me a better impression. I would much rather have great responses with lower availability than mediocre responses available all the time.

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#93

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.

Interesting. I also find it frustrating to be rate limited/have responses fail when I’m paying for the product, but I’ve actually found that the “concise” mode answers have less fluff and make for faster back and forth. I’ve once or twice looked for the concise mode selector when the load wasn’t high.

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#94

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 been using the API for a few weeks and routinely get 529 overloaded messages. I wasn’t sure if that’s always been the case but it certainly makes it unsuitable for production workloads because it will last hours at a time.

Hopefully they can add the capacity needed because it’s a lot better than GPT-4o for my intended use case.

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#95
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

ok but how much cash, really.. looks ambiguous. ps- plenty of people turning a blind eye towards rampant valuation inflation and "big words" statements on deals. Where is the grounding on the same dollars that are used at a grocery store? The whole thing is fodder for instability in a big way IMHO

I don't really see any ambiguity? If the reporting is accurate, the whole $4B is cash.

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#96

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.

Hmmm... I wonder if this is why some of the results I've gotten over the past few days have been pretty bad. It's easy to dismiss poor results on LLM quality variance from prompt to prompt vs. something like this where the quality is actively degraded without notification. I can't say this is in fact what I'm experience, but it was noticeable enough I'm going to check.

Never occurred to me that the response changes based on load. I’ve definitely noticed it seems smarter at times. Makes evaluating results nearly impossible.

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#97

Does anyone know how they are going to make money and turn a profit one day?

LLM inference is getting cheaper year over year. It often loses money now, it may eventually stop losing money when it gets cheap enough to run.

- But surely the race to the bottom will continue?

Maybe, but they do offer a consumer subscription that can diverge from actual serving costs.

/speculation

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#98

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…

There's also another angle. During the call with Lex last week, Dario seemed to imply that future models would run on amazon chips from Annapurna Labs (Amazon's 2015 fabless purchase). Amazon is all about the flywheel + picks and shovels and I, personally, see this as the endgame. Create demand for your hardware to reduce the per unit cost and speed up the dev cycle. Add the AWS interplay and it's a money printing machine.

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#99
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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".

They don’t disclose it, but I’d imagine so. They also admit to being a couple of years late, so they’re accelerating (as per their last earnings call)

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#100

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…

Trivia: not sure if you’re aware, but there’s billion dollar companies in all these spaces you claim “nobody cares about”. Every single stock broker in the US trades crypto now. Omniverse earns Nvidia a ton of money, Apple earned a billion dollars with a clunky v1 and Meta is selling more and more Quests every half.
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