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Amazon will invest up to $4B in Anthropic

anthropic.com

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Re: Amazon will invest up to $4B in Anthropic

#61

Post by IanCal »

philshem wrote: post #22
IanCal wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alexa and google home have been excellent for discovering new music. You ask them for a song you know and they play either a very weird cover version or something entirely different.

I am not a Google Home or Alexa user, and I honestly can't tell if this is meant to be sarcastic.

Semi-serious.

It regularly picks up an entirely bizarre song, however in doing so it's also found some bangers. My kid loves diggy-diggy hole and it played the wind rose version (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34CZjsEI1yU) which is awesome.

I asked for I wanna be like you for the kids and got the expected one a few times. Then one time it returned the triple J version by the Psychedelic Porn Crumpets (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bD0VpmaSBjs) which became the new version for running around the room pretending to be a rollercoaster.

These are covers at least, but it will also just play the weirdest mishearings of something.

So semi-serious as I'm mocking it getting things wildly wrong, but also legitimately we discover new music this way.

Re: Amazon will invest up to $4B in Anthropic

#62

Post by alberth »

anonylizard wrote: post #56
alberth wrote: post #43

> ” AWS will become Anthropic’s primary cloud provider” How much of this becomes creative accounting? AWS gets to reduce its profits by making this investment, which means they pay less taxes. Then with AWS’ own money, they will get to recognize this as new AWS cloud revenue continuing their sales growth. While all during which they also get an equate stake. This seems like a creative way for AWS (and Microsoft with…

There's no creative accounting. Amazon reduces its profits, and pays less taxes, true. They also do get sales growth. But nowhere is this "AWS' own money". AWS has to pay Nvidia for the chips. Nvidia is worth 1 trillion for a reason.

> ”But nowhere is this ‘AWS' own money"

But it is.

Anthropic will be paying for AWS cloud services with the same money AWS gave them as an investment.

Re: Amazon will invest up to $4B in Anthropic

#63

Post by cmcaleer »

alberth wrote: post #31

For those who don’t know, Anthropic has an interesting list of investors: - Eric Schmidt (former Google CEO/Chairman), Series A - Sam Bankman-Fried (FTX), lead investor in Series B - Caroline Ellison (FTX), Series B - Google, Series C https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/anthropic/company_fi... ——— Question: why isn’t Anthropic using Google Cloud, given who their past investors include?

Funny that FTX customers might end up having a non-trivial amount of cents on the dollar added to their claims by a lucky investment out of the many shotgunned by SBF and crew.

Re: Amazon will invest up to $4B in Anthropic

#64

Post by donny2018 »

divo6 wrote: post #37

So does anyone know how this works out with Googles investment a few months back?: Announcement "Anthropic Partners with Google Cloud" Feb 3, 2023 - https://www.anthropic.com/index/anthropic-partners-with-goog... "...Anthropic, an AI safety and research company, has selected Google Cloud as its cloud provider. The partnership is designed so that the companies can co-develop AI computing systems; Anthropic will levera…

Jan 25, 2024

“Azure will become Anthropic’s primary cloud provider for mission critical workloads, providing our team with access to leading compute infrastructure and Microsoft’s expertise in AI cloud services”.

Re: Amazon will invest up to $4B in Anthropic

#65

Post by Yizahi »

wiz21c wrote: post #42
amackera wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds nice, and the information on https://www.anthropic.com/company seems to back up your claim, but do you know of anything on Anthropic's corporate governance level that will help ensure this mission is followed (forever)? The profit motive is _very_ resilient. Right now I will take it on face value that it's fuel for the ethical mission, but in the future that might change. It's far (far) more likely that t…

or worse: investors will redefine ethics so to match their profit model.

Anyone who unironically says that they are going to improve/police/redefine ethics should be considered immediately suspect. It's a massive red flag if someone is thinking that their ethics are better than other's. Bonus red flag points if that comes from a corporation.

It is also very telling that a corporation called literally "human-first" is developing a tool to displace said humans completely. Now it is possible that it won't be able to do this, but the problem is that almost everyone including the creators believe that NNs will do it.

Re: Amazon will invest up to $4B in Anthropic

#66

Post by cmcaleer »

code51 wrote: post #53
alberth wrote: post #31

For those who don’t know, Anthropic has an interesting list of investors: - Eric Schmidt (former Google CEO/Chairman), Series A - Sam Bankman-Fried (FTX), lead investor in Series B - Caroline Ellison (FTX), Series B - Google, Series C https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/anthropic/company_fi... ——— Question: why isn’t Anthropic using Google Cloud, given who their past investors include?

(Just speculating) They'll probably out SBF and Ellison through legal financial means at one point. Looks like a heavy burden to carry from this point on. If they don't, Eric Schmidt - SBF family connection will start to look suspicious.

It doesn't look like SBF owns the stake, rather FTX does. Creditors seemed to have gotten lucky that that the bankruptcy handlers aborted the sale of their stake a few months ago[0].

[0]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-27/bankman-f...

Re: Amazon will invest up to $4B in Anthropic

#67

Post by IanCal »

gwd wrote: post #46
IanCal wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alexa and google home have been excellent for discovering new music. You ask them for a song you know and they play either a very weird cover version or something entirely different.

Siri has been helpful for increasing my 3-year-old's vocabulary: he'll ask it to play a song he knows, and Siri will pick out an explicit R&B piece full of all sorts of words he's never been exposed to. (Seriously -- there's a song with the title "The ABC Song", which as one might expect, is about the ABCs. But it's impossible to get it to play that via voice control; it only wants to play "abcdefu", which is not the…

Haha, the speed at which you need to be able to get it to stop is a key parenting skill. Saying that 4 seconds into a Tom Cardy song as my son says "but I love this one".

Maybe this is why some people are so good at the intro round at pub quizzes, you've got a few seconds to identify the exact song that's playing and mentally run through the lyrics before making a call.

Re: Amazon will invest up to $4B in Anthropic

#68

Post by IanCal »

djjzjshdhhd wrote: post #44
philshem wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not a Google Home or Alexa user, and I honestly can't tell if this is meant to be sarcastic.

It's a joke. Google Assistant is notoriously awful and at home we often kid that if we ask it to play 90's rock on Spotify it will play some animal documentary on Netflix. It's not too far from the truth.

Oh I love that, you ask it for a song, it gets it wrong and thinks you want some video. Then it tries to play the video, can't and acts like you were daft for asking it to do that.

Re: Amazon will invest up to $4B in Anthropic

#69

Post by whatppldontsay »

alberth wrote: post #31

For those who don’t know, Anthropic has an interesting list of investors: - Eric Schmidt (former Google CEO/Chairman), Series A - Sam Bankman-Fried (FTX), lead investor in Series B - Caroline Ellison (FTX), Series B - Google, Series C https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/anthropic/company_fi... ——— Question: why isn’t Anthropic using Google Cloud, given who their past investors include?

Well, the catholic church does run bunches of schools and orphanages. So quite interesting, indeed!

Re: Amazon will invest up to $4B in Anthropic

#70

Post by benterix »

alberth wrote: post #62
anonylizard wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no creative accounting. Amazon reduces its profits, and pays less taxes, true. They also do get sales growth. But nowhere is this "AWS' own money". AWS has to pay Nvidia for the chips. Nvidia is worth 1 trillion for a reason.

> ”But nowhere is this ‘AWS' own money" But it is. Anthropic will be paying for AWS cloud services with the same money AWS gave them as an investment.

I think you're both right. It's a bit inflated as AWS services are overpriced in general. On the other hand, we're speaking specifically about significant use of Nvidia GPUs which are in demand right now so it's not like Amazon can just use their spare capacity.
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