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Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

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Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#351
post #329
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes exactly. This was the brilliance of the original MSFT investment into OpenAI. It was an investment in Azure scaling its AI training infra, but roundabout through a massive customer (exactly what you’d want as a design partner) and getting equity. I’m sure Anthropic negotiated a great deal on their largest cost center, while Amazon gets a huge customer to build out their system with.

or simply one of the best corporate buyouts that's not subject to regulatory scrutiny. microsoft owns 49% of OpenAI - will get profits till whenever. All without subject to regulatory approval. and they get to improve Azure

A caveat -- FTC is currently looking into the deal between Microsoft and OpenAI.

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not a scam at all. Amazon doesn’t have an AI story. So they invest in Anthropic, get a lot of that money back as revenue that seeds demand. Their customers now have an incentive to do AI in AWS. That drives more revenue for AWS.

> Amazon doesn’t have an AI story. A quibble: AWS _does_ have an AI story (which i was originally dismissive of): Bedrock as a common interface and platform to access your model of choice, plus niceties for fine tuning/embeddings/customization etc. Unlike say Azure theyre not betting on _a_ implementation. Theyre betting that competition/results between models will trend towards parity with limited fundamental differ…

Sure they do, but it doesn’t have a ton of traction relative to the size of AWS.

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#353

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.

No they should not do this. They are trying to create generalized artificial intelligence not a specific one. Let the cursor, zed, codeium or some smaller company focus on that.

I wonder at OpenAI, Anthropic etc, how many people actually believe in "creating generalized artificial intelligence"

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#354
post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you aren't using LLMs for most knowledge work you're probably wasting time somewhere.

If you are using LLMs and call the result knowledge you're probably not acting ethically.

Yesterday I needed to take an unstructured document with about 1,200 timestamps and substract 1 second 550ms from each of those.

I could have written code for it, but Claude output a perfectly valid HTML page I could locally paste my document in, which gave me the accurate output I needed.

This is knowledge work.

Today I had another document, about the length of a small book, where H3 and H4 titles were mistakenly provided in the wrong language. I needed those 159 titles to be changed while preserving the rest of the document, with a very specific maximum word count per title. Claude did this with a single natural language prompt. (though I had to tell it to "go on" every couple hundred lines)

This is also knowledge work. Knowledge work is not generating new knowledge, just like manual work isn't about generating new hands.

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Guardrails on Claude Sonnet 3.5 API are not stricter than Openai's guardrails in my experience. More specifically, if you access the models via API or third party services like Poe or Perplexity the guardrails are not stricter than GPT4o. I've never subscribed to Claude.ai so can't comment on that. I have no experience with Claud.ai vs ChatGPT but it's clear the underlying model has no issue with guardrails and t…

> The Guardrails on Claude Sonnet 3.5 API are not stricter than Openai’s guardrails in my experience. Both Gemini and Claude (via the API) have substantially tighter guardrails around recitation (producing output matching data from their training set) than OpenAI, which I ran into when testing an image text-extraction-and-document-formatting toolchain against all three. Both Claude and Gemini gave refusals on text ex…

Have you had luck with Google's AI Studio with regard to text extraction?

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#357

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

Looking at API providers like Together that host open source models like Llama 70b and running these models in production myself, they have healthy margins (and their inference stack is much better optimized).

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#358
post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you think MSFT isn't 95% copycat? Teams is Slack clone. Azure is AWS clone. SurfaceBook (remember those?) Macbook clone. Edge is Chrome clone. Bing is Google clone. Even VSCode was an Atom/Electron fork and Windows Subsystem for Linux...

Surface Books are nothing like Macbooks - Macbooks don't have a touch screen, pen support, or reversible screen tablet mode, and the whole structure is completely different. Surface Pro, Surface Book, and Surface Laptop Studio are some of the most original laptop form factors I've seen.

Exactly.

Too bad Microsoft only cares about enterprise customers and never made the Surface line attractive to regular consumers. They could have been very interesting and competitive alternatives to MacBooks.

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#359

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…

Also: they need top tier models for their Bedrock business. They are one of only a few providers for Claude 3.5 - it’s not open and anthropic doesn’t let many folks run it.

Google has Gemini (and Claude), MSFT has OpenAI. Amazon needs this to stay relevant.

Re: Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic

#360
post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No they should not do this. They are trying to create generalized artificial intelligence not a specific one. Let the cursor, zed, codeium or some smaller company focus on that.

I wonder at OpenAI, Anthropic etc, how many people actually believe in "creating generalized artificial intelligence"

N.B. that the ordering matters here — Generalized Artificial Intelligence is not the same thing as Artificial General Intelligence
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