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Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

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Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#101

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

relatedly: is claude3.5-haiku being delivered above their cost, after they quadrupled the price? Though it wouldn't ensure profitability since they're spending so much on training. I'm sure with inference-use growing, they're hoping that eventually total_expenses(inference) grows to be much much larger than total_expenses(training)

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#102

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.

Recently I started wondering about the quality of ChatGPT. A couple of instances I was like: "hmm, I’m not impressed at all by this answer, I better google it myself!"

Maybe it’s the same effect over there as well.

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#103

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

Same as the big tech companies, probably make all of their products worse in service to advertising. AI-generated advertising prompted by personal data could be extremely good at getting people to buy things if tuned appropriately.

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#104

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.

This is not how it works.

First, revenue is irrelevant.

Second, the investment isn't a loan that they need to repay. They are getting equity.

Third, Anthropic is exclusively using AWS to train its models. Which, yes, means if AWS gives them $4B and it costs them $500M/year to pay for AWS services then after 8 years, the cash is a wash. However this ignores the second point.

Fourth, there is brand association for someone who wanted to run their own single tenant instance of Claude whereby you would say "well they train Claude on AWS, so that must be the best place to run it for our " similar to OpenAI on Azure.

Fifth, raising money is a signaling exercise to larger markets who want to know "will this company exist in 5 years?"

Sixth, AWS doesn't have its own LLM (relative to Meta, MS, etc.). The market will associate Claude with Amazon now.

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#105

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 mean, look at Linux and Firefox!

> look at Linux and Firefox!

AI models are more like a programming language or CPU architecture.

OpenAI is Intel and Anthropic is AMD.

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#106

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

I think voice mode makes significantly more sense when you consider people commuting by car by themselves every day.

Personally I don't (and I'd never talk to an LLM on public transit or in the office), but almost every time I do drive somewhere, I find myself wishing for a smarter voice-controlled assistant that would allow me to achieve some goal or just look up some trivia without ever having to look at a screen (phone or otherwise).

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#107
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can recommend https://github.com/tkellogg/dura for making auto-commits without polluting main branch history, if your tool doesn't support it natively

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#108
post #49

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.

> 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.

Normal people aren't paying for LLMs.

If they ever do Apple and Google will offer it as a service built into your phone .

For example, you could say ok Google call that restaurant me and My girlfriend had our first date at 5 years ago, set up something nice so I can propose. And I guess Google Gemini ( or whatever it's called at this point), Will hire a band, some photographers, and maybe even a therapist just in case it doesn't work out.

All of this will be done seamlessly.

But I don't imagine any normal person will pay 20 or $30 a month for a standalone service doing this. As is it's going to be really hard to compete against GitHub Copilot they effectively block others from scrapping GitHub.

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#110
post #104

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.

This is not how it works. First, revenue is irrelevant. Second, the investment isn't a loan that they need to repay. They are getting equity. Third, Anthropic is exclusively using AWS to train its models. Which, yes, means if AWS gives them $4B and it costs them $500M/year to pay for AWS services then after 8 years, the cash is a wash. However this ignores the second point. Fourth, there is brand association for some…

> Sixth, AWS doesn't have its own LLM (relative to Meta, MS, etc.). The market will associate Claude with Amazon now.

Amazon/AWS has their line of Titan LLMs: https://aws.amazon.com/bedrock/titan/

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