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Amazon will invest up to $4B in Anthropic
- AuthConnectFail 3y agoStrange given google's investment history, they owned roughly 15ish% before this.
- sidcool 3y agoAnd the battle heats up.
- ignoramous 3y agoInterestingly, AWS (along with YC.org, Infosys, Musk, and others) was one of the founding donors for OpenAI, the non-profit. A few years and Satya Nadella successfully Mark Zuckerberged them.
- mi_lk 3y ago> Mark Zuckerberged them As in? MZ as a verb can be interpreted too many ways
- ignoramous 3y agoStupendous in going after key deals and closing them.
- quickthrower2 3y agoThe real winners will be the nuclear reactor plant builders. And TSMC.
- amackera 3y agoAnd hopefully all of us plebs as well? I might be too optimistic about the future of AI.
- Tempest1981 3y agoWould love to see AI impact education. Help "left-behind" students catch up.
- liveoneggs 3y agoThe purpose of AI is to replace any hope of employment those students had.
- quickthrower2 3y agoBS jobs will fill the void. They have to, unless we move away from capitalism to a star trek style world.
- baq 3y agoIf this means alexa isn't a pet rock that can only reliably set timers, good for them.
- devoutsalsa 3y agoIt's also good at setting alarms.
- vinay_ys 3y agoI wish Siri did that consistently. Right now my Apple Watch Siri is unusable even to set timers. I don't know if the latest updates on my old watch struggles to run or what else the issue could be.
- chemmail 3y agoOld siri goes online, the new series 10 watch stuff is local, so might be better? Holding my breath lol .
- starbugs 3y agoThat's the only thing I am using it for and I'd prefer if it stays that way.
- IanCal 3y agoAlexa 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.
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- ddoolin 3y ago$4B in AWS credits. So...$4M?
- traveler1 3y agoBy the sounds, it's actually a $4B investment (taking minority stake) whilst also potentially providing free access to some AWS services? The degree or agreement of access to AWS services isn't totally clear though...
- quickthrower2 3y agoHetzner should make a move with a rack or two :-)
- unicornmama 3y agoHave they upgraded from stone-age era GPUs?
- jatins 3y agoAt this point Apple is the only BigTech without any major investment in LLMs. Which isn't too surprising, they have historically never jumped on the shiny new thing until the dust clears off.
- digitcatphd 3y agoI do suspect they are making internal investments. The latest iOS update has substantially improved speech to text capabilities.
- djjzjshdhhd 3y agoExactly OP's point. STT/TTS is such an old technology at this point.
- jsemrau 3y agoGiven that I unsuccessfully applied for AIML Annotation roles at Apple for years, I also believe they are building similar tech with internal talent.
- quickthrower2 3y agoApple makes shiny new things once in a while. Maybe they are not so good at catch up so plan to keep excelling at non AI shiny things (there is a lot of money in the not AI niche!)
- AraceliHarker 3y agohttps://www.theverge.com/2023/9/6/23861763/apple-ai-language-models-ajax-gpt-training-spending https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/6/23861763/apple-ai-language...
- exitb 3y agoTheir new autocorrect is based around LLM. Not sure if it's a major investment, but it is a real product.
- yieldcrv 3y agoerm misconception. Apple hasn’t released a dedicated chatbot but they use models heavily and in very targeted ways all the iPhones have had a transformer co-processor for several generations, the neutral engine is primed for use with this current crop with just a little more dedicated ram to it this is arguably better than the pick me chatbot thing but Apple is also primed to disrupt all of that, they include a fine tuned model chatbot style client side on all their OS’ and that substantially shifts the battlefield, a smart client side siri that only optionally connects to a large cloud model? even better an SDK for all the AI startups to leverage that instead of token price arbitraging with OpenAI api or other cloud providers like replicate? all hail the Apple supremacy
- wodenokoto 3y agoI’ve never heard of anthropic. Who are they and what do they offer that’s worth that investment?
- inglor 3y agoThey have an excellent LLM called Claude which is quite competitive with OpenAI offerings and has long context windows. Other than OpenAI’s models they have been able to deliver the best results in projects I worked on and sometimes they outperformed OpenAI models too. I’m happy to see this as this gives them funding to further train expensive models and compete - their product is really nice at the moment but could really benefit from bigger size and even bigger contexts.
- modeless 3y agoThey have Claude 2 which is up there with GPT-4 and PaLM 2 as one of the top three publicly accessible large language models. And presumably those billions will train Claude 3.
- Tiberium 3y agoI'm sorry but I'll have to disagree with you - Claude 2 is worse than GPT-4 in almost all tasks I've tried it with, the two things that it's better at than GPT-4 are the context window and the dataset being from early 2023 instead of late 2021 (for 3.5 Turbo/4).
- swores 3y agoBeing worse than GPT-4 doesn't dispute GP's claim that it's in the top 3 with GPT-4. To disagree with them you need to name models other than GPT-4 and PaLM 2 which are also better than Claude 2.
- _ea1k 3y agoI've found it to be marginally worse at some coding tasks than gpt-3.5, but it is all highly specific to the kinds of questions that I'm asking.
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- Condition1952 3y agoinvesting in automation and efficiency will help them save hundreds of dollars in warehouse worker's wages in the long run
- abra0 3y agoGreat to see investment in the most alignment-conscious of the AI orgs.
- quickthrower2 3y agoAnthropic’s main mission is ethical. Profit is just fuel for the ethical mission (and they would rather have hockey stick AI safety than hockey stick growth given the choice) Amazon, well you know them :-) Flogging their model on Bedrock etc. must be part of the plan for Anthropic but AWS investment must surely create tension.
- amackera 3y agoThis sounds nice, and the information on https://www.anthropic.com/company 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 the ethical mission will change than the profit motive will change. More funding doesn't change it, it just raises the stakes.
- wiz21c 3y agoor worse: investors will redefine ethics so to match their profit model.
- Yizahi 3y agoAnyone 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.
- digging 3y agoAi will overtake all human capabilities on the right timescale. (We just don't know whether that's an order of years, decades, or centuries). It... doesn't make sense that an entire human couldn't be perfectly artificially replicated eventually (and then, obviously, surpassed immediately), unless you believe in a non-physical soul which powers some aspect of our conscious thought. Even if you believe in such a soul, does it govern the non-conscious systems that do almost all of the work of thinking and feeling? If not - once again, artificial systems will certainly surpass natural ones. In other words, it's not a question of whether humans will always be the masters, but a question of whether the "gods" we create will love us or hate us. Anthropic is aiming for the former.
- Mxbonn 3y agoI've been using the claude model over the past months and I have to say I usually prefer it over ChatGPT. Some things that impressed me particular are: * It can often give you working urls of images related to your query. (e.g. give me some images to use with this blog paragraph). * It can list relevant publications corresponding to paragraphs, chatgpt often halucinates new papers but claude consistenly gives highly cited and relevant suggestions. * It can work with pdf inputs.
- lucgagan 3y agoAs a counter point, I've been actively assessing feasibility of migrating my experiments to Claude with not much success. Trying to migrate prompts from GPT 4 to Claude often yields half-baked results. Claude seems to require a lot more handholding to get the desired result.
- visarga 3y agoIn my information extraction prompts Claude is about as good as GPT-3.5 but slower. Its only advantage over OpenAI is context length. GPT-4 is better, 3.5 is faster. But I am using it often to chat with PDFs and it works great for that. I would not want to give this ability up.
- baq 3y ago> But I am using it often to chat with PDFs and it works great for that. I would not want to give this ability up. Side note: this would get you a crackpot moniker a year ago. Chat with pdfs? Dude what are you smoking I need some too. Perfectly normal today, in fact if you aren’t doing that you’re falling behind.
- amanzi 3y agoYou didn't say which version of GPT you prefer it over. My experience of Claude hasn't been good at all - I get obvious hallucinations all the time. Whereas I get pretty consistent accurate results with GPT-4. I just tried again now and asked it about HTMX and Django since I had just been reading an article about it. Claude invented a package called `htmx.django` and a decorator that could be imported called `@hx_request`. This is typical of my experience with Claude.
- miohtama 3y agoI doubt there is $4B cash changing hands here. Did they invest with AWS Credits? Is AI chip access futures the new cryptocurrencies ponzi?
- yieldcrv 3y agoyou’re just noticing?
- az226 3y agoIt’s likely a combination of 1) AWS credits, 2) hard cash, 3) tranches. If I had to guess probably $200-500M cash, and rest in credits and probably 2-4 tranches. Hence why it is “up to”.
- az226 3y agoFirst tranch apparently $1.25B. No details as of now how much was cash.
- alberth 3y agoFor 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_financials https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/anthropic/company_fi... ——— Question: why isn’t Anthropic using Google Cloud, given who their past investors include?
- code51 3y ago(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.
- cmcaleer 3y agoIt 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-fried-s-ftx-said-to-halt-sale-of-its-stake-in-ai-startup-anthropic https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-27/bankman-f...
- mkl 3y agoRelated from December (but unresolved there): Will Anthropic return the $580M in Series B funding led by SBF? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34111082 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34111082 Related from June: FTX Halts Sale of Its $500 Million Stake in AI Startup Anthropic https://archive.ph/WR94S https://archive.ph/WR94S Seems like FTX owns that stake, not Bankman-Fried and Ellison? Nishad Singh was apparently involved too: https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/yz7xpx/investigating_ftxs_investment_in_anthropicai_500m/?rdt=41096 https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/yz7xpx/inve...
- crazygringo 3y agoWhy would an investment ever be "returned"? Because of its investment, FTX owns shares in Anthropic. In bankruptcy, those shares will be sold in some form to new investors in exchange for cash, at whatever the current value is. Just like any other asset. In theory, I suppose that new investor could be Anthropic itself doing a stock buyback, but that would be extremely unusual. Buybacks are for mature companies with excess cash, not growing startups.
- divo6 3y agoSo 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-google-cloud 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 leverage Google Cloud's cutting-edge GPU and TPU clusters to train, scale, and deploy its AI systems." Announcement "Expanding access to safer AI with Amazon" Sep 25, 2023 - https://www.anthropic.com/index/anthropic-amazon https://www.anthropic.com/index/anthropic-amazon "AWS will become Anthropic’s primary cloud provider for mission critical workloads, providing our team with access to leading compute infrastructure in the form of AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips, which will be used in addition to existing solutions for model training and deployment. Together, we’ll combine our respective expertise to collaborate on the development of future Trainium and Inferentia technology."
- dboreham 3y agoPrimary
- donny2018 3y agoJan 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”.
- az226 3y agoPoor prediction.
- benterix 3y agoGCP is notorious for the limited availability of ML instances so I'm not surprised about this announcement.
- alphabetting 3y ago
- alberth 3y ago> ” 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 OpenAI) to artificially boost cloud revenues.
- anonylizard 3y agoThere'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.
- alberth 3y ago> ”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.
- benterix 3y agoI 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.
- inoop 3y agoAWS has its own line of AI accelerators called Inferentia that offers reduced cost versus Nvidia, but it's often a pain to make stuff work because everything is written for CUDA. Inferentia team spends a lot of time porting OS models to their hardware for customers to use (e.g. through SageMaker).
- alephnerd 3y ago> How much of this becomes creative accounting? None. While AWS is probably providing sweetheart compute rates to it's portfolio, their stake in the company will also rise in value as the company grows out their revenue and goes for another round, or even an IPO. This is the whole point of CVC - put strategic investments in rising companies playing in segments or sub-segments that you as a company don't want to enter directly yet while building out an ecosystem and also ensuring you don't become the next Kodak.
- doubtfuluser 3y agoSo what will this mean in relation to their recent Alexa announcements? are they using Anthropic in this announcement? Is it so difficult for a big company to build their own?
- max_hammer 3y agoCan you please share some more details for Alexa announcement
- tinyhouse 3y agoAlexa has been building their own LLM stuff for years now. Their models are also available on AWS. This Anthropic investment sounds much more of an AWS investment. If the Alexa LLMs were popular and capable like the best models, Amazon wouldn't invest in Anthropic. Currently if you want to use OpenAI models with better rate limits, you go to Azure. Since openai models are the most popular rn, that creates a problem for AWS. So they invested in the second most popular, which is still significantly more popular and capable than the Alexa models.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 3y agoDoes azure have better latency than directly calling openai?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- msp26 3y agoAlmost every paragraph has 2 references to 'safety'. At some point it feels a bit redundant, we get it.
- sp332 3y agoThey're probably trying to tune a language model.
- umvi 3y agoDoes "safety" just mean that the LLM output is heavily censored?
- superkuh 3y agoYep. Censored like a god-fearing puritan just off the boat and butt-covering non-responses to everything else like a lawyer. So "aligned" that they can't even pass a turing test. The only good LLM is the one you're running locally.
- staticman2 3y agoIn practice, AI safety means the output is censored. But these companies (including OpenAI) seem to attract people who think they are protagonists in Terminator 2, Judgement Day: "One Anthropic worker told me he routinely had trouble falling asleep because he was so worried about A.I. Another predicted, between bites of his lunch, that there was a 20 percent chance that a rogue A.I. would destroy humanity within the next decade. (Bon appétit!)" https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/11/technology/anthropic-ai-claude-chatbot.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/11/technology/anthropic-ai-c...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- d4rkp4ttern 3y agoStill waiting for my Claude keys
- sp332 3y agoHow long?
- saliagato 3y agoEurope
- d4rkp4ttern 3y agoI’m in US, waiting 5 mos
- sp332 3y agoIn the US, I got access almost immediately when I signed up in June.
- d4rkp4ttern 3y agoCrazy. I don’t know what they gain by super slow rollouts like this. It puts them at a serious disadvantage while ChatGPT gets entrenched in people’s daily workflows and the perception grows that it’s the best.
- qwertyman2 3y ago[flagged]
- DiabloD3 3y agoIf Amazon has $4B to invest into what may end up being the Theranos of AI research, why don't they have $4B to invest into their workforce and, you know, actually pay people instead of all the extra-legal shenanigans they're pulling to avoid cutting paychecks? Edit: For those not understand what I'm referencing, Amazon is currently trying to get out of owning their Seattle offices, and are using "get back to the office" tactics to harass workers into leaving so they can dump the real estate at loss: https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/unpacking-amazons-stealthy-mass-layoff-strategy-in-seattle/ https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/unpacking-amazons-steal... It isn't about their global payroll spend dwarfing the $4B. Its about having a sense of ethics and a grasp of math.
- mynegation 3y agoDo you mean investing 4B internally instead? That would not be an investment into AI or LLM that Amazon considers strategic? Would they be able to invest 4B internally specifically for this? Maybe yes, but I’d argue they already probably tried it and it did not work as well as they hoped. Or they do know it may not be as effective.
- aeyes 3y agoWhenever I see such comments I ask myself if you have no imagination what Amazons payroll looks like? They have 1.5M employees, total payroll is well beyond $100B per year. Now over what timespan do they invest this money? 5 years? 10 years?
- danielcampos93 3y agoWhat happens to Cohere with this announcement? Seems the music has stopped and there is no hyperscaler left. Oracle?
- m3kw9 3y agoWhen you miss out on OpenAI you end up with poor man’s OpenAI
- jstummbillig 3y agoMeh. From what I can tell this space is both way too infant and volatile for anyone to get either excited or upset about status. The rolling ball seems way more interesting than where it's currently at.
- m3kw9 3y agoLooking back we can see how savvy Microsoft was to invest in OpenAI so early
- riku_iki 3y agofuture will tell, there is a chance OpenAI will just burn through the 10B on training without creating revenue stream
- nojvek 3y agoThat sweeet seeet GPU money for Nvidia and OpenAI employees. And I guess a huge chunk of that is Azure GPUs which probably cost MS a lot less. Cloud providers have margins >50%.
- nibab 3y agoSeveral things to note here: Amazon as a corporate investor - Of course a lot of this is a futures contract on cloud compute. This indicates how much the leadership here thinks the compute will be problem. Money comes way cheaper outside of the big cloud providers (they also know the importance of compute and pull their leverage). This is not a sure bet. While true AGI is probably sitting behind a huge amount of compute, the “products” that are catching on right now are very much on lower end of the spectrum for required model performance. Small models are cheaper and can run on commodity compute. It’s not entirely clear to me that this is a financially sound bet.. Timing - This is an interesting time to do so. That indicates that the company feels that it’s shown some of its best work and right now is the time to bank and on that (so as to make the leap to the next big breakthrough). Openai did so on the heels of ChatGPT. This is somewhat discouraging, because outside of the context length hackery, Anthropic doesn’t have much to show as a differentiator. At best they’re a me-too startup set on the path to be acqui-hired by Amazon when the VC money subsidizing the compute drains up. Structure/Size - there was a lot of information about the structure of the openai deal. We’re not so clear on what’s happening here. One of the big questions is valuation. Making a similar promise to openai (ie 50% of profit until 100b) would put the valuation of the company in to 10s of billions. Note that this is a very different proposition than a year ago. In navigating the “product maze” we’ve realized that there aren’t that many killer products. Most enterprises are throwing spend in this direction because the board requires you to have an “ai strategy”. At best, we’re talking about capturing all the VC money that’s going into companies with a new angle on knowledge management/search. As I mentioned above, that’s something that’s getting severely commoditized at the bottom of the market. The prospects here are pretty grim .
- kalkin 3y ago"Money comes way cheaper outside of the big cloud providers" Say more about it this? It's not obvious to me why it should be true or what evidence there is for it.
- correlator 3y agoI would think that AWS also offers a lot of distribution opportunities for Anthropic.
- Beinglis23 3y agoI think it might be because they want to diversify their infrastructure and reduce the risk associated with relying solely on one provider. It's interesting to see Anthropic switching cloud providers from Google to Amazon. I think it might be because they want to diversify their infrastructure and reduce the risk associated with relying solely on one provider. Additionally, AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips could offer specialized hardware support that aligns better with their AI workloads. This move doesn't necessarily reflect poorly on Google Cloud's future, but it does indicate that Anthropic wants to explore multiple cloud options for their AI projects.
- iandanforth 3y agoFWIW I can't build OpenAI into our product without huge headaches around privacy policies and getting additional customer consent. I can build Amazon services into our products because Amazon is a trusted vendor and we use an AWS stack already. Because Anthropic / Claude is available via Amazon Bedrock, they have a significant advantage in any company that's already using AWS. If you're on Azure, OpenAI has that advantage.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- badrequest 3y agoYou can enter a DPA (data processing agreement) with OpenAI that forbids subsequent training on submitted content.
- acchow 3y ago> FWIW I can't build OpenAI into our product without huge headaches around privacy policies and getting additional customer consent Doesn't this imply that a new competitor beginning with a lenient customer privacy policies as well as a customer base that doesn't care as much about privacy will rise up to challenge you? And possibly iterate faster?
- jedberg 3y agoA bunch of folks in the thread seem confused as to why they would do this after their Google investments. It's important to note that Amazon has been working closely with Anthropic for a long time, and already vends their models in AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/bedrock/ https://aws.amazon.com/bedrock/ So if anything this is just a more public way of acknowledging the existing relationship.
- throw03172019 3y agoHas anyone gotten access to AWS Bedrock (Claude is available)? I’ve been waiting for months.
- malfist 3y agoGood luck, even internally it's hard to get access. Got to have a director sign off.
- b8 3y ago[this is good]
- phibbs 3y ago[dead]
- phibbs 3y ago[dead]