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Seems like an odd thing to do when all we’ve been hearing about for the last 10 years is how great Google’s AI capabilities are (“but you’re not allowed to actu
by siquick 3y ago
Seems like an odd thing to do when all we’ve been hearing about for the last 10 years is how great Google’s AI capabilities are (“but you’re not allowed to actually see or use them”) - even more so when Amazon just invested $1.5B in Anthropic a few weeks ago.
- arkitaip 3y agoI think their primary goal is to make life difficult for OpenAI by investing in a competent competitor that brings a level of agility that Google just can't deliver.
- ritabratamaiti 3y agoSpeculating... but maybe Anthropic is about to come up with something big
- refulgentis 3y agoNope
- edgyquant 3y agoCan you maybe elaborate since you’re clearly in the know?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- refulgentis 3y agoNo
- tjpnz 3y agoSimplest explanation is it was all PR hype.
- schleck8 3y agoYou are telling me Google Assistant and Alexa aren't sentient ASI?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- refulgentis 3y agoLet's not flatten the differences between ChatGPT and those (your humble source worked on Google Assistant and appreciates your kindness)
- yreg 3y agoBut Google did discover the tech the current AI craze is based on.
- pzo 3y agoxerox as well invented computer mouse and GUI as we know it.
- yreg 3y agoAnd you wouldn't accuse Xerox of doing "PR hype". Xerox did the exact opposite thing, they had not realized the value of research done in PARC.
- m00x 3y agoDoesn't mean they know how to make it into a product.
- tjpnz 3y agoA common failure mode for startups and a reminder of how universal those lessons are. Whether it would be the death knell of Google we'll have to wait a bit longer.
- dragonwriter 3y agoAnthropic, like OpenAI, has a big lead in Google in terms of productization, but lags behind OpenAI in visibility, posing a big risk of OpenAI getting so much mindshare that even if Google were to catch up in productization, everyone in the market would already be tied ti what was visibly the only game in town. Helping fund Anthropic and assuring that there is visible competition also makes it more likely that LLM-backend-agnostic services will exist and a culture of evaluating offerings rather than just automatically going to OpenAI is established, which puts Google in a better position if they really are ahead in basic science and just suffering from a past lack of commeecialization focus that is remedied by the recent reorg and refocusing of Google’s AI efforts. (Also, it may help avoid the situation where Google’s lack of product and and the financial relationship between other cloud providers and the AI vendors that have competitive product means that Azure is the favored enterprise platform for OpenAI, Amazon works out something similar with Anthropic, and Google Cloud loses competitive position because Google AI isn’t competitive and Google doesn't have the right partnerships.)
- infecto 3y agoAnthropic lacks more than visibility. I don’t know if it’s an issue with compute or leadership but it’s been really difficult getting access. Of course I guess you can run it on bedrock now? I signed for api access on Anthropics site maybe 6 months ago. Never any follow up, not even to tell me I can use bedrock to run it.
- jasondclinton 3y agoNot sure how this happened, really sorry that this happened to you. Please reach out again, we've gotten through all of our backlog.
- lvl102 3y agoIt could very well be that they lost the talent.
- visarga 3y agoThey lost most of top talent, it is their people who created OpenAI and Anthropic.
- zooq_ai 3y agoGoogle Cloud and Google DeepMind have different goals. The goal of Cloud is to sell as much compute as possible to the rest of the world. So, they want as many foundational models that are running on their cloud. Since OpenAI is married to Azure, Google and Amazon are trying hard to get the remaining. Of course GCP can just bet on Gemini, but if you are the head of GCP you wouldn't put all your eggs in one basket. I mean the essence of cloud is redundancy and load distribution. It applies to business strategies too
- Yoric 3y agoInteresting take. I was analyzing this as not putting all your eggs in one basket in terms of AI capabilities, but you are right that it's probably also true in terms of cloud sales.
- kromem 3y agoThey are keeping the landscape from becoming too centralized around another direct competitor. Open AI is now basically Microsoft. Copilot in all your docs, etc. If only Amazon was the large investor in Anthropic it encourages a similar exclusive partnership to develop where Anthropic ends up powering Alexa with proprietary access to its SotA models. Google throwing money that way keeps Anthropic from becoming too siloed into a partnership with one cloud direct competitor, and also helps fund another competitor to the company in the lead who is partnered with a different cloud direct competitor. I wouldn't read into it beyond that, and certainly not in thinking this reflects product shortcomings or advantages.
- TuringNYC 3y ago1. OpenAI is too large a supplier for LLMs, and they are trying to create supplier diversity 2. $2B is a drop in the bucket for Google. Even after the severe fall this month, the Google Market Cap is $1.536 Trillion. Consider the investment as a % of market cap 3. It is undeniable that small players can move fast, so even if Google's AI is amazing, the slope is probably not as high as a fast moving startup 4. These products have 2nd order revenue boosters -- you might use Anthropic's marketplace app, as a theoretical example, but you end up spending much more on compute/storage/cloud in doing so, helping the cloud majors
- HNDen21 3y agoI would not consider the investment as a % of market cap since Google doesn't own all that market cap... I would consider the non float shares + short term investments + cash on hand or Revenue/Profit better
- WrongAssumption 3y agoNot seeing how that distinction matters. Google’s owners (shareholders) do own all that. And google represents the collective financial interests of the shareholders.
- staticman2 3y agoGoogle's shareholders own stock. Nothing more nothing less.
- sangnoir 3y ago> I would not consider the investment as a % of market cap since Google doesn't own all that market cap. Market cap does matter because you can use it to gauge how easily Google could hypothetically raise the same amount[1] by issuing additional shares without a shareholder revolt. 1. Or complete an all-stock deal or acquisition.
- state_less 3y agoIt's not odd, this is how big capital extends itself into the future. Alphabet and Amazon are giant tech conglomerates that have been doing this for years. Alphabet bought Youtube, Android, DoubleClick, DeepMind, Maps, etc. Plenty of things, and maybe the best things people think of when they think of Google are actually bought from the marketplace and integrated into the giant. They buy whatever they want that might help their cause. This quarter alone Alphabet's free cash flow is $22B. This is a small bet for them. Why wouldn't they spend a small fraction in a key area for them?
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y agoAnd that is why they should have been broken up many years ago. The lack of teeth of us anti competitive laws goes against capitalism.
- jdgoesmarching 3y agoWhat. Deploying capital to make investments is the central conceit of capitalism. It’s right there on the tin.
- Yoric 3y agoI don't feel that capitalism is an end to be pursued, but I agree that these conglomerates should be broken, for the sake of avoiding irreversible concentration of power.
- naillo 3y agoNot really irreversible unless they get a monopoly on violence, so as long as the overton window from the publics perspective shifts dominantly towards breaking them up in the future we'll be able to get a better situation.
- troyvit 3y agoThey (search, social media, advertising companies) are gaining a monopoly on truth. With that they indirectly control the government, which is the one with the monopoly on violence.
- SanderNL 3y agoThis is the only thing they can do. They don’t produce anything. They buy. Their AI is a joke and all they earn money on is ads. MS is beating them on the AI front, hard, and they have multiple interesting avenues like having an actual OS, basically all the world’s code and all the world’s business. 2B is too little too late as well. It’s almost embarrassing. MS dumped 10B into OpenAI. 2B is a lukewarm, visionless move.
- edgyquant 3y agoI don’t think 2B is too little. Anthropic already has a competitive LLM they lack a competitive dataset I think and need to scale. 2B can allow them to do this. I don’t know that Google wants Claude to be theirs they just don’t want Microsoft to own the generative AI market
- _cs2017_ 3y agoWhy do you say that MS beating Google on AI? OpenAI is not part of MS (49% ownership is nice but it doesn't give MS control of the company). MS by itself doesn't own any of foundational models competitive with Google. MS has a solid AI research team, but it's not ahead of Google DeepMind. Microsoft Azure beats Google Cloud, but I don't think you count GPU rentals as AI? If MS actually bought OpenAI, it would be a different story.
- visarga 3y agoLooks like Google has better hardware for AI than anyone else, and they are the only company having both AI research and AI hardware. OpenAI+Microsoft and Anthropic+Amazon are much less integrated, working at arms length. > Google will have multiple very large clusters across their infrastructure for training and by far the lowest cost per inference, but this won’t automatically grant them the keys to the kingdom. If the battle is just access to compute resources, Google would crush both OpenAI and Anthropic. > Being “GPU-rich” alone does not mean the battle is over. Google will have multiple different clusters larger than their competitors, so they can afford to make mistakes with pretraining and trying more differing architectures. What OpenAI and Anthropic lack in compute, they have to make up in research efficiency, focus, and execution. https://www.semianalysis.com/p/amazon-anthropic-poison-pill-or-empire https://www.semianalysis.com/p/amazon-anthropic-poison-pill-...
- makestuff 3y agoIn addition to what others have said about them having so much capital to invest, another angle is that AI is a hot topic right now. It is a much worse PR headline for it to come out that Google’s AI did something bad. If a headline comes out that Anthropic’s model did something bad, very few people will connect the dots to Anthropic’s investors.
- ta988 3y agoThey are starting to let people try their "capabilities" and it isnt great from having tried them.
- datadeft 3y agoIt is a diversification bet I guess.
- cushychicken 3y agoWhen you’re pulling down $15 billion in profits a quarter, it’s not nuts to drop a chunk on an opportunity that might end up winning the whole market. Safe hedge imo.
- lr1970 3y ago> even more so when Amazon just invested $1.5B in Anthropic a few weeks ago. Amazon invested not $1.5B but $4B in Anthropic one month ago [0]. [0] https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/amazon-steps-up-ai-race-with-up-4-billion-deal-invest-anthropic-2023-09-25/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/amazon-steps-up-ai-rac...
- modeless 3y agoIsn't this just laundering money into the cloud division? GOOG was decimated after the last earnings call by poor cloud results. This is at least a billion in revenue for Google Cloud, right?
- ttul 3y agoThey are buying upside and they are funding a competitor to OpenAI and Microsoft. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. There are only so many groups in AI that have the chops to take on OpenAI and Anthropic is one of them - if not the most promising.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]