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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), lea

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_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 ago
  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-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 ago
Related 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 ago
  Why 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.
  - ac29 3y ago
    > Why would an investment ever be "returned"? Because the money used for the investment was stolen.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - tornato7 3y ago
      Let's say for sake of argument the investment by FTX was made at a valuation of $1B and Anthropic is now worth $10B. Could Anthropic now say, "Oh no, that money was stolen, the investment was never valid, we're returning every last cent." and essentially do a huge share buyback at a steep discount to current valuation?
      - rmbyrro 3y ago
        I guess that's not how corporate liquidation work. A liquidator will evaluate the assets current market value and try to liquidate them in the most advantageous way for creditors. Which means: they'll try to get at least the valuation that Anthropic got from the AWS deal. The problem is: they need to find someone willing to buy these shares at this price. If they do so, FTX creditors will be happy.
    - aqme28 3y ago
      FTX was an investment company. Of all the fraud that company did do, this is like the one thing they were supposed to be doing. And it's up, so if you think they should renege investments, start with the ones that failed and not the profitable ones.
cmcaleer 3y ago
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.
- dharma1 3y ago
  Could be made whole even? Hasn’t majority of the 8b lost by FTX been recovered by now - maybe this is enough to fill the remaining gap (on some timeframe)
  - cmcaleer 3y ago
    Probably a little ambitious. Claims trading is currently priced at ~35c on the dollar[0], which isn't great but certainly better than what claims were trading at to begin with (~10c on the dollar). [0]: https://claims-market.com/pricing https://claims-market.com/pricing
    - TrapLord_Rhodo 3y ago
      There seems to be a huge gap between bid and ask there (40%!!). That's a huge arb. I wonder what the liquidity is like for these claims.
  - qeternity 3y ago
    Most of the FTX assets are worthless altcoins that are being marked to market at ridiculous prices that you could never liquidate at. Anthropic is definitely claimants best hope at a reasonable recovery.
whatppldontsay 3y ago
Well, the catholic church does run bunches of schools and orphanages. So quite interesting, indeed!
boeingUH60 3y ago
It's plausible that FTX customers will be made whole from the Anthropic investment profits in addition to the $7bn or so recovered so far...that'll be wild!
edf13 3y ago
The downside to the whole FTX coming good from this bet is SBF will claim his methods were valid!
- janalsncm 3y ago
  He can say whatever he wants. His credibility is in the tank given that he stole from his only cheerleaders.
xyst 3y ago
Not good for a company to receive funds from investors that we now know stole and grifted from their customers. Wonder if this company is all just smoke and mirrors at this point. Never heard of this company prior to the Amazon investment. Kind of reminds me of the Amazon and Rivian partnership. This nobody EV company gets an investment from Amazon, interest/hype boosts potential revenue/preorders. Valuations spike to billions. IPO debuts at ~$120/share. Insiders sell shares. Hype wears off. Now it’s trading at ~$21/share.
- ianhawes 3y ago
  Claude 2 is probably the closest competitor to GPT-4 at this point. If you haven’t heard of them before it’s because you weren’t paying attention.
  - j0hnyl 3y ago
    +1 - Anthropic is doing cool stuff. I recommend playing with it. You can upload files directly and it has token limit of 100k.
- edgyquant 3y ago
  Anthropic is known for having a model with a context nearly 3x that of ChatGPT. You must not be following LLMs very closely
  - benreesman 3y ago
    As someone who had been rabidly following developments in the space until earlier this year: I’ve fallen a bit behind. I’be been walking around with the (seemingly misguided) view that the bigger LLaMA 2 models were sort of neck and neck with like 3.5-turbo, Claude, and the rest of the first string modulo GPT-4 that had a pretty steady if eroding lead. What’s the lay of the land in 9/23? Or better yet, what do I need to bookmark to get the inside baseball?
    - p1esk 3y ago
      Don’t worry, GPT-4 is still the best.
logicchains 3y ago
>Question: why isn’t Anthropic using Google Cloud, given who their past investors include? They also have a fiduciary duty to their other investors, and going all-in on Google cloud would be a pretty big risk (relative to other cloud providers) given the uncertainty about whether it'll still exist in 5-10 years.
- londons_explore 3y ago
  What do the betting markets think about the continued existence of Google Cloud? https://manifold.markets/OliverMattos/will-google-announce-the-closure-of?r=T2xpdmVyTWF0dG9z https://manifold.markets/OliverMattos/will-google-announce-t...
  - srveale 3y ago
    > the betting markets For context, there are 5 people and 1 bot betting, and it's not real cash or even something with a cash equivalent, and the bet amounts are less than what you get for free on sign up -- not exactly what I'd call a "market". And the bet is that they'll close Google Cloud in 2 years, not 5-10 years as is being discussed.
- jocaal 3y ago
  Why wouldn't google cloud exist in 5-10 years? The scale of the project isn't the same as google reader or of their other cancelled projects.
  - NikolaNovak 3y ago
    I think that's true and Google cloud as such is unlikely to completely vanish (it may or may not morph significantly and any given service or price isn't necessarily safe) Still, for proper context, google reader may be small but google stadia was big by any scale, with significant datacentre investment, dedicated consumer hardware, exclusive publishing deals, marketing campaigns, etc. And 10 years isn't as long as it used to be in the IT world :)
    - 3y ago
troyvit 3y ago
I would ask, what are they using instead and what would they get by switching to Google Cloud that they don't already have?
atorodius 3y ago
> Question: why isn’t Anthropic using Google Cloud, given who their past investors include? They claimed to use it back in February: 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“
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
ternaus 3y ago
Google invested 1B to Lyft, but Lyft used AWS for cloud compute. (I left Lyft in 2021, could be different now) Investment department and cloud compute departments are very different entities and if the investment to Antropic was not a part of the Google cloud expansion strategy moving to a new cloud is such a pain, that noone will do it. Opposite example is Kaggle. Google bought it as a marketing tool for Google Cloud => all the years since acquisition Kaggle team worked on adding differnt Google Cloud features to the platform
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bushbaba 3y ago
Google VC doesn't push Google products in an effort of remaining neutral and getting access to the best deals. It's a strategic mis-step for Google the company, but a win for Google the VC arm. Also shows Google's internal dis-organization.
- surajrmal 3y ago
  Or it shows that they don't want to abuse their position?

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 ago
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-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 ago

Related 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 ago
Why 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.
- ac29 3y ago
  > Why would an investment ever be "returned"? Because the money used for the investment was stolen.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - tornato7 3y ago
    Let's say for sake of argument the investment by FTX was made at a valuation of $1B and Anthropic is now worth $10B. Could Anthropic now say, "Oh no, that money was stolen, the investment was never valid, we're returning every last cent." and essentially do a huge share buyback at a steep discount to current valuation?
    - rmbyrro 3y ago
      I guess that's not how corporate liquidation work. A liquidator will evaluate the assets current market value and try to liquidate them in the most advantageous way for creditors. Which means: they'll try to get at least the valuation that Anthropic got from the AWS deal. The problem is: they need to find someone willing to buy these shares at this price. If they do so, FTX creditors will be happy.
  - aqme28 3y ago
    FTX was an investment company. Of all the fraud that company did do, this is like the one thing they were supposed to be doing. And it's up, so if you think they should renege investments, start with the ones that failed and not the profitable ones.

cmcaleer 3y ago

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.

dharma1 3y ago
Could be made whole even? Hasn’t majority of the 8b lost by FTX been recovered by now - maybe this is enough to fill the remaining gap (on some timeframe)
- cmcaleer 3y ago
  Probably a little ambitious. Claims trading is currently priced at ~35c on the dollar[0], which isn't great but certainly better than what claims were trading at to begin with (~10c on the dollar). [0]: https://claims-market.com/pricing https://claims-market.com/pricing
  - TrapLord_Rhodo 3y ago
    There seems to be a huge gap between bid and ask there (40%!!). That's a huge arb. I wonder what the liquidity is like for these claims.
- qeternity 3y ago
  Most of the FTX assets are worthless altcoins that are being marked to market at ridiculous prices that you could never liquidate at. Anthropic is definitely claimants best hope at a reasonable recovery.

whatppldontsay 3y ago

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

boeingUH60 3y ago

It's plausible that FTX customers will be made whole from the Anthropic investment profits in addition to the $7bn or so recovered so far...that'll be wild!

edf13 3y ago

The downside to the whole FTX coming good from this bet is SBF will claim his methods were valid!

janalsncm 3y ago
He can say whatever he wants. His credibility is in the tank given that he stole from his only cheerleaders.

xyst 3y ago

Not good for a company to receive funds from investors that we now know stole and grifted from their customers. Wonder if this company is all just smoke and mirrors at this point. Never heard of this company prior to the Amazon investment. Kind of reminds me of the Amazon and Rivian partnership. This nobody EV company gets an investment from Amazon, interest/hype boosts potential revenue/preorders. Valuations spike to billions. IPO debuts at ~$120/share. Insiders sell shares. Hype wears off. Now it’s trading at ~$21/share.

ianhawes 3y ago
Claude 2 is probably the closest competitor to GPT-4 at this point. If you haven’t heard of them before it’s because you weren’t paying attention.
- j0hnyl 3y ago
  +1 - Anthropic is doing cool stuff. I recommend playing with it. You can upload files directly and it has token limit of 100k.
edgyquant 3y ago
Anthropic is known for having a model with a context nearly 3x that of ChatGPT. You must not be following LLMs very closely
- benreesman 3y ago
  As someone who had been rabidly following developments in the space until earlier this year: I’ve fallen a bit behind. I’be been walking around with the (seemingly misguided) view that the bigger LLaMA 2 models were sort of neck and neck with like 3.5-turbo, Claude, and the rest of the first string modulo GPT-4 that had a pretty steady if eroding lead. What’s the lay of the land in 9/23? Or better yet, what do I need to bookmark to get the inside baseball?
  - p1esk 3y ago
    Don’t worry, GPT-4 is still the best.

logicchains 3y ago

>Question: why isn’t Anthropic using Google Cloud, given who their past investors include? They also have a fiduciary duty to their other investors, and going all-in on Google cloud would be a pretty big risk (relative to other cloud providers) given the uncertainty about whether it'll still exist in 5-10 years.

londons_explore 3y ago
What do the betting markets think about the continued existence of Google Cloud? https://manifold.markets/OliverMattos/will-google-announce-the-closure-of?r=T2xpdmVyTWF0dG9z https://manifold.markets/OliverMattos/will-google-announce-t...
- srveale 3y ago
  > the betting markets For context, there are 5 people and 1 bot betting, and it's not real cash or even something with a cash equivalent, and the bet amounts are less than what you get for free on sign up -- not exactly what I'd call a "market". And the bet is that they'll close Google Cloud in 2 years, not 5-10 years as is being discussed.
jocaal 3y ago
Why wouldn't google cloud exist in 5-10 years? The scale of the project isn't the same as google reader or of their other cancelled projects.
- NikolaNovak 3y ago
  I think that's true and Google cloud as such is unlikely to completely vanish (it may or may not morph significantly and any given service or price isn't necessarily safe) Still, for proper context, google reader may be small but google stadia was big by any scale, with significant datacentre investment, dedicated consumer hardware, exclusive publishing deals, marketing campaigns, etc. And 10 years isn't as long as it used to be in the IT world :)
  - 3y ago

troyvit 3y ago

I would ask, what are they using instead and what would they get by switching to Google Cloud that they don't already have?

atorodius 3y ago

> Question: why isn’t Anthropic using Google Cloud, given who their past investors include? They claimed to use it back in February: 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“

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

ternaus 3y ago

Google invested 1B to Lyft, but Lyft used AWS for cloud compute. (I left Lyft in 2021, could be different now) Investment department and cloud compute departments are very different entities and if the investment to Antropic was not a part of the Google cloud expansion strategy moving to a new cloud is such a pain, that noone will do it. Opposite example is Kaggle. Google bought it as a marketing tool for Google Cloud => all the years since acquisition Kaggle team worked on adding differnt Google Cloud features to the platform

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

bushbaba 3y ago

Google VC doesn't push Google products in an effort of remaining neutral and getting access to the best deals. It's a strategic mis-step for Google the company, but a win for Google the VC arm. Also shows Google's internal dis-organization.

surajrmal 3y ago
Or it shows that they don't want to abuse their position?