Live data from Hacker News

Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

cnbc.com

121–130 of 383 posts

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#121
post #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.

Well. If you're using AI instead of a search engine, they could make the AI respond with product placement more or less subtle.

But if you're using AI for example to generate code as an aid in programming, how's that going to work? Or any other generative thing, like making images, 3d models, music, articles or documents... I can't imagine inserting ads into those would not destroy the usefulness instantly.

My guess is they don't know themselves. The plan is to get market shre now, and figure it out later. Which may or may not turn out well.

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#122
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.

I use Claude Pro paid version every day, but not for coding. I used to be a software engineer, but no longer. I tried OpenAI in the past, but I did not enjoy it. I do not like Sam Altman.

My use cases: Generating a business plan, podcast content, marketing strategies, sales scripts, financial analyses, canned responses, and project plans. I also use it for general brainstorming, legal document review, and so many other things. It really feels like a super-assistant.

Claude has been spectacular about 98% of the time. Every so often it will refuse to perform an action - most recently it was helping me research LLC and trademark registrations, combined with social media handles (and some deviations) and web URL availability. It would generate spectacular reports that would have taken me hours to research, in minutes. And then Claude decided that it couldn't do that sort of thing, until it could the next day. Very strange.

I have given Gemini (free), OpenAI (free and Paid), Copilot (free), Perplexity (free) a shot, and I keep coming back to Claude. Actually, Copilot was a pretty decent experience, but felt the guardrails too often. I do like that Microsoft gives access to Dall-E image generation at no cost (or maybe it is "free" with my O365 account?). That has been helpful in creating simple logo concepts and wireframes.

I run into AI with Atlassian on the daily, but it sucks. Their Confluence AI tool is absolute garbage and needs to be put down. I've tried AI tools that Wix, Squarespace, and Mira provide. Those were all semi-decent experiences. And I just paid for X Premium so I can give Grok a shot. My friend really likes it, but I don't love the idea of having to open an ultra-distracting app to access it.

I'm hoping some day to be like the wizards on here who connect AI to all sorts of "things" in their workflows. Maybe I need to learn how to use something like Zapier? If I have to use OpenAI with Zapier, I will.

If you read this far, thanks.

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#123
post #112

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.

There's one problem with Claude's chat box where ``` opens an intrusive code block box that's hard to close/skip.

But I also agree that Claude 3.5 Sonnet is giving very good results. Not only for coding, and also for languages other than English.

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#124
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.

I mean, he's certainly acting as if he's entitled to train on all of it for free as long as it's not made by a big enough company that may be able to stop/sue him. And then feels entitled to complain about artists tainting the training data with tools.

He has a very "wealth makes right" approach to the value of creative work.

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#125

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.

Which use case do you think benefits more regular customers around the world?

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#126
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.

So it's a $2.4B investment, announced as $4B.

Significantly less, still a huge investment.

I look forward to the moment the sunk cost fallacy shows up. "We've invested $20B into this, and nothing yet. Shall we invest $4B more? Maybe it will actually return something this time." That will be fun.

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#127
post #13

Anthropic gets a lot of it's business via AWS Bedrock so it's fair to say that Amazon probably has reasonable insight into how the Claude usage is growing that makes them confident in this investment

They are also confident in the investment because they know that all the money is going to come right back to them in the short term (via AWS spending) whether or not Anthropic actually survives in the long term.

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#128
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…

The difference between things you'd say like "it's true that..." and "the market will associate..." basically is the definition of a scam.

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#129
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Recently I asked 4o to ‘try again’ when it failed to respond fully, it started telling me about some song called Try Again. It seems to lose context a lot in the conversations now.
Post reply on HN