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Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

cnbc.com

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Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#111

Post by uptownfunk »

liquidise wrote: post #3

Can someone with familiarity in rounds close to this size speak to their terms? For instance: i imagine a significant part of this will be “paid” as AWS credits and is not going to be reflected as a balance in a bank account transfer.

Yes, that is the case. It is largely 4B in capex investment, I’d imagine 10% or less is cash. One would think nvidia could get much better terms investing its gpu (assuming they can get it into a working cluster). Instead it’s nvidia gets cash for gpu hardware, that hardware gets put into a data center and AWS invests their hardware as credits for equity instead of cash. And because AWS has already built out their data center infra they can get a better deal than nvidia making the play because nvidia has to rebuild an entire data center infra from scratch (in addition to designing gpu etc).

Now if AWS or gcp can crack gpu compute better than nvidia for training and hosting, then they can basically cut out nvidia and so essentially they get gpu at cost (vs whatever markup they pay to nvidia).

Because essentially whatever return AWS will make from Anthropic will be modulated by the premiums paid to nvidia to invest and also the cost of operating a data center for Anthropic.

But thankfully all of that gets mediated on paper because valuation is more speculative than the returns on nvidia hardware (which will be known to the cent by AWS given its some math of hourly rate and utilization which they have a good idea of)

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#112

Post by gavi »

I love Claude 3.5 sonnet and their UI is top notch especially for coding, recently though they have been facing capacity issues especially during weekdays correlating with working hours. Have tried Qwen2.5 coder 32B and it's very good and close to Claude 3.5 in my coding cases.

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#113

Post by diego_sandoval »

hiq wrote: post #88
staticman2 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

The amount of free chats you get per day is way too limiting for anyone who uses LLMs as an important tool in their day job.

20 USD a month to make me between 1.5x and 4x more productive in one of the main tasks of my job really is a bargain, considering that 20 USD is very small fraction of my salary.

If I didn't pay, I'd be forced to wait, or create many accounts and constantly switch between them, or be constantly copy-pasting code from one service to the other.

And when it comes to coding, I've found Claude 3.5 Sonnet better than ChatGPT.

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#115

Post by lasermike026 »

thornewolf wrote: post #97
lasermike026 wrote: post #59

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

I'm working with models and the costs are ridiculous. $7000 card and 800 watts later for my small projects and I can't imagine how they can make money in the next 5 to 10 years. I need to do more research on hardware approaching that reduces costs and power consumption. I just started experimenting with llama.cpp and I'm mildly impressed.

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#116

Post by uptownfunk »

lasermike026 wrote: post #59

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

Cost of inference will tend to the the same as cost of a Google search. It is infra that will come down to negligible and almost free. Then as others have said it will tend to freemium (pay to have no ads). And additional value added services as they continue to evolve up the food chain (ai powered sales, marketing, etc)

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#118

Post by MrsPeaches »

lxgr wrote: post #106
fullstackwife wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (…

This is the direction I am building my personal LLM based scripts. I don’t really know any python but Claude has written python scripts that e.g. write a document iteratively using LLMs. Next step will be to use voice and autogpt to do things that I would rather dictate to someone. E.g. find email from x => write reply => edit => send

Much more directed/almost micro managing but it’s still quicker than me clicking around (in theory).

Edit: I’m interested to explore how much better voice is as an input (vs writing as an input)

To me, reading outputs is much more effective than listening to outputs.

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#119

Post by Filligree »

nowahe wrote: post #81
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.

Hate to be that guy, but did you tell it up front not to ask? And, of course, in a long-running conversation it's important not to leave such questions in the context.

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#120

Post by maleldil »

pknerd wrote: post #44

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

Are you a paying customer? I exclusively use their best model and while I get warnings (stuff about longer chats leading to more limit usage), I've never been kicked out.

The only thing is that they've recently started defaulting to Concise to cut costs, which is fine with me.

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