[HN Gopher] Amazon will invest up to $4B in Anthropic
___________________________________________________________________
Amazon will invest up to $4B in Anthropic
Author : jedwhite
Score : 500 points
Date : 2023-09-25 07:07 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.anthropic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.anthropic.com)
| Beinglis23 wrote:
| I 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.
| jatins wrote:
| At 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 wrote:
| I do suspect they are making internal investments. The latest
| iOS update has substantially improved speech to text
| capabilities.
| djjzjshdhhd wrote:
| Exactly OP's point. STT/TTS is such an old technology at this
| point.
| jsemrau wrote:
| Given that I unsuccessfully applied for AIML Annotation roles
| at Apple for years, I also believe they are building similar
| tech with internal talent.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Apple 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 wrote:
| https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/6/23861763/apple-ai-language...
| exitb wrote:
| Their new autocorrect is based around LLM. Not sure if it's a
| major investment, but it is a real product.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| erm 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
| djjzjshdhhd wrote:
| /s ?
| yieldcrv wrote:
| it will feel like Apple supremacy to all of YC's new AI
| portfolio companies
| doubtfuluser wrote:
| So 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 wrote:
| Can you please share some more details for Alexa announcement
| tinyhouse wrote:
| Alexa 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 wrote:
| Does azure have better latency than directly calling openai?
| [deleted]
| ddoolin wrote:
| $4B in AWS credits. So...$4M?
| traveler1 wrote:
| By 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 wrote:
| Hetzner should make a move with a rack or two :-)
| unicornmama wrote:
| Have they upgraded from stone-age era GPUs?
| wodenokoto wrote:
| I've never heard of anthropic. Who are they and what do they
| offer that's worth that investment?
| inglor wrote:
| They 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 wrote:
| They 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 wrote:
| I'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).
| jsight wrote:
| I'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.
| swores wrote:
| Being 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.
| hcks wrote:
| They are basically the only direct competitor to OA.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Except for Google
| anonylizard wrote:
| Google Deepmind exists. All 3 are trying to build a
| generalist AI agent, as opposed to the more specialised
| models of say CharacterAI or inflection.
| phillipcarter wrote:
| Sure, they're all competing _labs_ , but Deepmind isn't a
| competitor for a product offering. Anthropic is quite
| analogous to OpenAI because they have an API you can pay
| for an a chatbot product you can use.
| benreesman wrote:
| I'm still trying to get my mind around a world where
| Brain/DeepMind aren't way ahead on all this. They were _so_
| far ahead _so_ recently.
|
| Is there a comeback story here? IIRC they've still got Dean
| and Hassabis and a bunch of other bruisers, along with
| arbitrary financing, the best training sets, and novel
| compute.
|
| Is it time to put Hassabis in charge and start making Ilya
| and Karpathy offers they can't refuse?
| loudmax wrote:
| The world's greatest engineering talent won't save you if
| the management is incompetent.
|
| Google may yet experience a comeback, but it will start
| with throwing out the current C-suite.
| benreesman wrote:
| Hassabis has some pretty serious chops on the leadership
| side as well as a firm grip on the technology.
|
| Him as CEO?
| riku_iki wrote:
| Deepmind didn't produce any AI product with good proven
| adaptation, while burned many billions.
| drexlspivey wrote:
| Is Deepmind doing LLMs? I thought it was a different team
| in Google that trained Bard/Palm
| theonlybutlet wrote:
| They merged Deepmind into Brain and rebranded it all
| Deepmind.
| warthog wrote:
| I think they merged the teams
| d4rkp4ttern wrote:
| Still waiting for my Claude keys
| sp332 wrote:
| How long?
| saliagato wrote:
| Europe
| b8 wrote:
| [this is good]
| Condition1952 wrote:
| investing in automation and efficiency will help them save
| hundreds of dollars in warehouse worker's wages in the long run
| qwertyman2 wrote:
| [flagged]
| DiabloD3 wrote:
| If 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-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 wrote:
| Do 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 wrote:
| Whenever 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?
| iandanforth wrote:
| FWIW 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.
| badrequest wrote:
| You can enter a DPA (data processing agreement) with OpenAI
| that forbids subsequent training on submitted content.
| benced wrote:
| Yes, that involves getting lawyers involved which is the
| aforementioned headache.
| milesward wrote:
| And I... believe that?
| janalsncm wrote:
| Is there a reason to believe Amazon is more trustworthy
| than OpenAI?
| [deleted]
| agnokapathetic wrote:
| OpenAI has committed to never training on API data. You no
| longer need a DPA for this.
|
| https://openai.com/enterprise-privacy
| acchow wrote:
| > 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?
| iandanforth wrote:
| Yes, but in enterprise software 'lenient customer privacy
| policies' don't last long.
| [deleted]
| abra0 wrote:
| Great to see investment in the most alignment-conscious of the AI
| orgs.
| AuthConnectFail wrote:
| Strange given google's investment history, they owned roughly
| 15ish% before this.
| Mxbonn wrote:
| I'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.
| airstrike wrote:
| ChatGPT 3.5 or 4? The difference between them is much more
| massive than "0.5" appears to suggest
| m3kw9 wrote:
| When using stuff like this you let the cream of top surface
| then use it. It will surface when enough people/publication
| give praise, otherwise you waste time evaluating too many
| models, it's not a fun task as they can give you illusions of
| being great at some but end up with overall worse. Right now
| gpt4 is king and haven't been any consistent chatter saying
| otherwise
| lucgagan wrote:
| As 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 wrote:
| In 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| You 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.
| shmatt wrote:
| Claude is bad at code and great at everything else, I thought
| that was pretty common knowledge by now. I second OP where I
| prefer using it over OpenAI models these days
| jeffreygoesto wrote:
| Why didn't you let it implement it and start a new project?
| edgyquant wrote:
| I've been using Claude for months now, as has my dev team and
| a number of other people I know, and we don't have this
| problem at all. In my experience is hallucinates less. This
| is compared to ChatGPT with GPT4. Anecdotal evidence is
| worthless it seem.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| hallucination is stochastic.
|
| Out of 1000 people flipping coins over and over again, on
| average people get a mix of hits and misses - there will
| always be someone who just get 10 heads in a row and
| someone else with 10 tails in a row, this corresponds to
| some users being wowed by the superintelligence nailing the
| answer every time and other users getting made up citation
| after made up citation.
| inciampati wrote:
| It won't hallucinate almost anything if you give it the
| entire documentation for the libraries you want to use. It
| can ingest many hundreds of pages of documentation without
| problem. Used like this it is far more powerful than GPT-4 or
| any existing model.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| i know some people say its extended context is more hackery
| than not, but I've found better success with Claude in
| roughing out some paragraphs before editing when i provide
| it a lot of context
| m3kw9 wrote:
| When you miss out on OpenAI you end up with poor man's OpenAI
| jstummbillig wrote:
| Meh. 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 wrote:
| Looking back we can see how savvy Microsoft was to invest in
| OpenAI so early
| riku_iki wrote:
| future will tell, there is a chance OpenAI will just burn
| through the 10B on training without creating revenue stream
| nojvek wrote:
| That 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%.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Anthropic'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.
| slig wrote:
| > Anthropic's main mission is ethical.
|
| And OpenAI's mission was "open".
| hcks wrote:
| > Anthropic's main mission is ethical.
|
| Strong FTX vibes.
|
| Also why aren't they a little bit more transparent about the
| deal? Are they worried GPT-7 from the future is gonna travel
| back in time to stop them?
| amackera wrote:
| 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
| the ethical mission will change than the profit motive will
| change.
|
| More funding doesn't change it, it just raises the stakes.
| acallaha wrote:
| I share your concerns about the corrupting influence of money
| (and the importance of this space), but wanted to point out
| that Anthropic announced two relevant things last week
| regarding corporate governance:
|
| First, that it has arranged to be controlled by a Long-Term
| Benefit Trust: "an independent body of five financially
| disinterested members with an authority to select and remove
| a portion of our Board that will grow over time (ultimately,
| a majority of our Board)".
| (https://www.anthropic.com/index/the-long-term-benefit-trust)
|
| Second, that it also published and committed to a Responsible
| Scaling Policy: https://www.anthropic.com/index/anthropics-
| responsible-scali...
|
| Disclaimer: I work at Anthropic
| foobarian wrote:
| Hey, even if it does revert to being finance driven, we
| still get at least a few sincere "don't be evil" years like
| we did with Google. I think it's still worthwhile.
| wiz21c wrote:
| or worse: investors will redefine ethics so to match their
| profit model.
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| That already exists and is called Effective Altruism.
| Yizahi wrote:
| 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.
| digging wrote:
| Ai _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.
| skulk wrote:
| > but a question of whether the "gods" we create will
| love us or hate us.
|
| You (and pretty much the entire debate around AI safety)
| have smuggled in the notion that these AIs even have the
| capacity to "love" and "hate," and have the agency to
| perhaps act vindictively. How we get from predicting the
| most plausible next token to a god-like entity with
| agency is... not clear at all.
|
| Do people think that we're actually sleepwalking towards
| skynet? Or are they just saying that so that Sam Altman
| can get the government to put in rules that bind everyone
| else while allowing OpenAI to proceed without competition
| and capture the extremely mundane real market of writing
| ad copy and such.
| digging wrote:
| > You (and pretty much the entire debate around AI
| safety) have smuggled in the notion that these AIs even
| have the capacity to "love" and "hate," and have the
| agency to perhaps act vindictively.
|
| It's a metaphor, actually. I guess I needed heavier use
| of quotes.
|
| The one thing we can be sure of is that if goal-oriented
| AI exists, it will follows goals.
|
| > How we get from predicting the most plausible next
| token to a god-like entity with agency is... not clear at
| all.
|
| It doesn't have to be clear. If it was clear, we'd be
| working on it. That's... how invention works.
| Joeri wrote:
| Dario Amodei (ceo of anthropic) has spoken about rising model
| training costs, and how he expected them to climb into the
| hundreds of millions of dollars. You could tell he didn't like
| it, because it means anthropic has to do deals like these just
| to keep up.
|
| So now the gpu farms of meta, google, X, microsoft and amazon
| are pretty much reserved for large foundation model training of
| specific models. It was probably a good thing for Anthropic to
| reserve their spot at the pool, even if as you point out it
| creates tension with their ethical mission. What options remain
| for other players who want to compete at this level I wonder?
| miohtama wrote:
| I doubt there is $4B cash changing hands here.
|
| Did they invest with AWS Credits? Is AI chip access futures the
| new cryptocurrencies ponzi?
| az226 wrote:
| It'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".
| yieldcrv wrote:
| you're just noticing?
| alberth wrote:
| 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?
| ternaus wrote:
| 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
| xyst wrote:
| 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.
| lsaferite wrote:
| Claude is pretty amazing actually. With it's 100k context
| widow it can do some interesting things
| ianhawes wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| +1 - Anthropic is doing cool stuff. I recommend playing
| with it. You can upload files directly and it has token
| limit of 100k.
| benreesman wrote:
| I'm no fan of the people you're talking about myself.
|
| But once we start going down that road we run smack on into
| companies with like the sovereign wealth fund in Riyadh or
| (to my embarrassment) Thiel or any number of people who make
| SBF look like the clueless, entitled, amoral but ultimately
| strictly small-change knucklehead he is.
|
| There are some truly scary people invested in important
| companies. Do we hold all the founders to account for that or
| none of them? It's not fair to pick and choose.
| jychang wrote:
| Yeah, we should totally put our trust in founders who would
| gladly accept money from immoral sources.
|
| We need to understand that society only values who moves
| first. The early bird gets the worm. If they want to play
| the game, they need to raise funds from people who truly
| understand power and money, regardless of the human cost.
|
| /s
| marcinzm wrote:
| >Yeah, we should totally put our trust in founders who
| would gladly accept money from immoral sources.
|
| You shouldn't put your trust in founders period. Or
| companies. Or famous people. Or anyone that you don't
| actually know. They're people or run by people with goals
| that greatly differ from your personal goals.
|
| What you're asking is that they put on a veneer of
| morality and then once you're really convinced they're on
| your side they'll stab you in the back. Like with the old
| poster child Google.
| benreesman wrote:
| Altman scared the fuck out of me a decade ago.
|
| And if I had told anyone five years ago that there would
| be eyeball scanners building a privately-held biometrics
| database at a level recently considered extreme for
| violent criminals? What letter anon would that have
| sounded like? _I_ would have been like easy there mom, no
| one is doing that.
|
| Are we allowed to talk about Loopt and Greenpoint and
| OpenAI and Autodesk and Siebel taking a year in Thailand
| while Socialcam flew into the side of a mountain on HN?
|
| Or do they get a pass?
| throwbigdata wrote:
| Yes, you are. Now, what are you talking about?
| benreesman wrote:
| The broader point is that I think a lot of successful
| tech figures get a pretty unfair rap on HN. Few if any of
| these folks are stirring candidates for the Nobel Peace
| Prize, but Bezos or Mark or Elon or even Gates being
| uniquely bad?
|
| Altman, with the full weight and backing of YC in its
| prime and a clear first-mover advantage got bailed out of
| the Loopt debacle [1] in a deal with Green Dot that
| _maybe_ scraped above the "fire sale" line and is
| trivially the most celebrated person in the program to
| not merit an "I made something people want" shirt. pg
| helped, Conway helped, they got it sort of cashed out in
| a way that didn't exactly fuck anyone sideways (other
| than Green Dot). He proceeded to fail upwards through
| preferential access to pre-IPO AirBnB shares and shit,
| became the leader of YC, and is now busily turning the
| world into Blade Runner 2023.
|
| Seibel was running Socialcam at a time when anyone
| working at or near FB knew it was a ranking glitch,
| pawned it off on Autodesk for 60MM [2] saying with a
| straight face it was the next YouTube, and promptly
| started inconsistently replying to emails titled "Where
| the fuck are you?". Also ran YC.
|
| Are these guys uniquely bad? Debatable, this is how the
| game is played apparently. But it would be nice to enjoy
| your ill-gotten gains without a relentlessly resourceful
| [3] PR campaign about how we're dealing with some real
| humanitarian visionaries.
|
| All I'm proposing is that if we trash Elon, then Altman
| doesn't get a free ride.
|
| n.b. A lot of that is me claiming things (that I heard
| from people in the room) that are merely alluded to in
| primary and secondary sources, so it'll be up to you to
| judge if it has what they call "the ring of truth".
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loopt
|
| [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialcam
|
| [3] http://www.paulgraham.com/relres.html
| edgyquant wrote:
| Anthropic is known for having a model with a context nearly
| 3x that of ChatGPT. You must not be following LLMs very
| closely
| benreesman wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Don't worry, GPT-4 is still the best.
| benreesman wrote:
| Water cooler chat is that it's a 1.5 terraweight, 16-way
| mixture model that is running at a loss on inference for
| paying customers.
|
| If that's true it fucking better be.
| p1esk wrote:
| This should not have stopped any of FAANGs from competing
| (especially Google), and yet they are still far behind
| OpenAI - more than a year after GPT-4 was trained.
| boeingUH60 wrote:
| 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!
| code51 wrote:
| (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 wrote:
| 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/bankm
| an-f...
| mkl wrote:
| 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
|
| Related from June: FTX Halts Sale of Its $500 Million Stake in
| AI Startup Anthropic 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/inve...
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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.
| l33tman wrote:
| Bankruptcy court can do clawbacks, I'm curious how that
| could apply for an investment scenario though.. it's not
| exactly paying a creditor or buying a Porsche just before a
| bankruptcy...
| skybrian wrote:
| Regardless of what's legally possible, it doesn't seem
| like an option that new FTX management would want to
| exercise, since they're trying to maximize the value of
| remaining assets for creditors.
|
| Clawbacks would make sense for a charitable donation or
| shares that have gone down in value. For an investment
| that's increasing in value, it makes more sense to sell
| it at market.
| ac29 wrote:
| > Why would an investment ever be "returned"?
|
| Because the money used for the investment was stolen.
| tornato7 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| throw03172019 wrote:
| They attempt to sell the shares of the company it
| invested in.
| umeshunni wrote:
| As a very crude analogy, if someone got access to my
| brokerage account and used to money in that to buy a
| Ferrari and got caught, do I get my money back or get the
| Ferrari (and presumably have to sell it)?
| aqme28 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| devindotcom wrote:
| I asked Dario this on stage last week. He said the shares are
| owned by the bankruptcy estate and are being sold/disposed of
| through that mechanism.
| [deleted]
| cmcaleer wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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)
| qeternity wrote:
| 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.
| cmcaleer wrote:
| 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
| TrapLord_Rhodo wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| bushbaba wrote:
| 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.
| logicchains wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| What do the betting markets think about the continued
| existence of Google Cloud?
|
| https://manifold.markets/OliverMattos/will-google-
| announce-t...
| srveale wrote:
| > 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.
| cnj wrote:
| > Google Cloud boosted its operating profits to $395 million
| for the second quarter
|
| From https://www.geekwire.com/2023/google-cloud-posts-second-
| stra...
|
| Yes, Google has killed a lot of products... but none of those
| ever came anywhere close to turning such a profit!
| jedberg wrote:
| Google includes the income from paid Gmail accounts in
| their cloud revenue. From all accounts, that is all of the
| profit and in fact it generates more profit that offsets
| the cloud losses.
| jsnell wrote:
| Do you have a reference to some of those "all accounts"?
| Doesn't need to be all of them, just a couple of the most
| credible ones would be great.
| zie wrote:
| To you and me, that's a lot of money, for Google's size
| that's really not a lot of money. The fact that it just
| became profitable certainly helps the beancounters decide
| to keep it around though.
| cflewis wrote:
| Being in Silicon Valley has warped my sense of money so
| much.
|
| When I read $300m, what I read is "when you factor in
| office costs & health care as well as salary/stock
| grants, an average FAANG software engineer must be ~$1m.
| That's only 300 employees!"
|
| It's a crazy way to think. Suddenly all prices that end
| with `m` and not `b` seem pointless.
| nerdjon wrote:
| I would say it's less wether or not Google Cloud will exist
| in 5-10 years (which is still a valid concern).
|
| But will specific parts of Google Cloud continue to exist or
| increase in cost. Things that have happened to GCloud very
| recently.
|
| It just isn't worth the risk to invest in google cloud.
| what_ever wrote:
| > But will specific parts of Google Cloud continue to exist
| or increase in cost. Things that have happened to GCloud
| very recently.
|
| Like what exactly?
| jocaal wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 :)
| joshuamorton wrote:
| Stadia existed for a total of 3 years. And downsized
| significantly after only two.
|
| Google cloud (it's earliest form anyway) launched in
| 2008. It's older than Drive and Photos. In a year or two,
| there will be Google employees younger than Cloud is.
| zht wrote:
| Google is hiring 15 year olds?
| joshuamorton wrote:
| "in a year or two".
| whatppldontsay wrote:
| Well, the catholic church does run bunches of schools and
| orphanages. So quite interesting, indeed!
| atorodius wrote:
| > 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-goog...
|
| ,,Anthropic, an AI safety and research company, has selected
| Google Cloud as its cloud provider"
| edf13 wrote:
| The downside to the whole FTX coming good from this bet is SBF
| will claim his methods were valid!
| janalsncm wrote:
| He can say whatever he wants. His credibility is in the tank
| given that he stole from his only cheerleaders.
| troyvit wrote:
| I would ask, what are they using instead and what would they
| get by switching to Google Cloud that they don't already have?
| danielcampos93 wrote:
| What happens to Cohere with this announcement? Seems the music
| has stopped and there is no hyperscaler left. Oracle?
| throw03172019 wrote:
| Has anyone gotten access to AWS Bedrock (Claude is available)?
| I've been waiting for months.
| malfist wrote:
| Good luck, even internally it's hard to get access. Got to have
| a director sign off.
| divo6 wrote:
| 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 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
|
| "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."
| benterix wrote:
| GCP is notorious for the limited availability of ML instances
| so I'm not surprised about this announcement.
| alphabetting wrote:
| Google says over 70% of generative AI unicorns are GCP
| customers though maybe they're multicloud or just there for
| TPUs.
| htrp wrote:
| Every Gen AI startup is on all 3 clouds for GPU
| availability + those sweet free credits.
| pyrale wrote:
| If you use Google Workspace, you're a GCP user under the
| hood.
|
| (...And it's not great when the workspace admin interface
| isn't enough anymore and you're dropped into the GCP admin)
| Palmik wrote:
| It could mean they use Google cloud services other than
| GPU/TPU, like Google Oauth, etc.
| alphabetting wrote:
| Possible but would be pretty misleading stat if so. It
| sounded to me like statement meant it was for generative
| AI needs. I know midjourney uses TPUs but for training
| but don't really know who the other generative AI
| unicorns are besides OpenAI.
| benterix wrote:
| They're listed here:
|
| https://techblog.comsoc.org/2023/06/18/generative-ai-
| unicorn...
|
| Anthropic, Cohere, HuggingFace, Lightricks, Runway,
| Jasper, Replit, Inflection, Adept, Character.ai,
| Stability.ai, Glean.
| dboreham wrote:
| Primary
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| Likely they'll do training on GCP and serving on AWS.
| donny2018 wrote:
| 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".
| az226 wrote:
| Poor prediction.
| xmprt wrote:
| I don't see the word exclusive anywhere in that press release
| so in all likelihood they'll be using both providers, just in
| different capacities.
| fragmede wrote:
| How it works, is Amazon just paid a bunch of money _just_ to be
| able to say that. This press release was written into the
| contract they signed, so us hearing about it isn 't just
| happenstance. What happens under the hood is secondary, really.
| obscur wrote:
| Depends on what you mean by works out. They are planning on
| doing huge training runs the coming years so they sure can make
| use of compute from both Google Cloud and AWS
| msp26 wrote:
| Almost every paragraph has 2 references to 'safety'. At some
| point it feels a bit redundant, we get it.
| umvi wrote:
| Does "safety" just mean that the LLM output is heavily
| censored?
| superkuh wrote:
| Yep. 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 wrote:
| In 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 appetit!)"
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/11/technology/anthropic-
| ai-c...
| sp332 wrote:
| They're probably trying to tune a language model.
| sidcool wrote:
| And the battle heats up.
| ignoramous wrote:
| Interestingly, 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 wrote:
| > Mark Zuckerberged them
|
| As in? MZ as a verb can be interpreted too many ways
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| The real winners will be the nuclear reactor plant builders.
| And TSMC.
| amackera wrote:
| And hopefully all of us plebs as well? I might be too
| optimistic about the future of AI.
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| Would love to see AI impact education. Help "left-behind"
| students catch up.
| liveoneggs wrote:
| The purpose of AI is to replace any hope of employment
| those students had.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| BS jobs will fill the void. They have to, unless we move
| away from capitalism to a star trek style world.
| jedberg wrote:
| A 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/
|
| So if anything this is just a more public way of acknowledging
| the existing relationship.
| nibab wrote:
| Several 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 wrote:
| "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.
| nibab wrote:
| If you were to place all "available money" on a continuum, at
| one end of the spectrum you'd have the "dumb opportunistic
| money" and at the other end you have "strategic/partnership
| capital". The money is very cheap if it comes from people
| that want to jump on the bandwagon of fomo. It's more
| expensive when it comes from strategic partners that know
| they have something to offer (and when I say cheaper I mean
| literally how much $ you pay per preferred share).
|
| I would consider most professional investors in AI somewhere
| in the middle of this continuum. The big clouds have the rare
| and coveted GPUs which are the lifeline to AI companies. That
| gives them way better terms than what a VC firm would get.
| correlator wrote:
| I would think that AWS also offers a lot of distribution
| opportunities for Anthropic.
| swamp40 wrote:
| _> aren't that many killer products_
|
| You've got to be kidding me. Maybe for text. But what about
| video training neural nets? I could list killer products for
| days.
| nibab wrote:
| There really isn't a product in text or other modalities that
| shows me this is a $1T dollar market in 10 yrs (as the
| valuations would imply).
|
| To play devils advocate, even if there were some killer
| products, value capture seems particularly tricky. There just
| aren't any business models that could sustain a market mass
| of this size.
|
| Lots of cool demos and productivity software (mind you with a
| very narrow definition of what productivity is).
| nostrademons wrote:
| Generative AI is very good at spewing bullshit.
|
| Unfortunately, the upper echelons of society run on
| bullshit. And so that's exactly why generative AI is
| revolutionary. The killer app is in separating dumb
| billionaires from their billions, just like crypto's killer
| app was. And just like crypto eventually filtered down to
| separating dumb retail investors from their thousands,
| generative AI may eventually filter down to generating
| scams & spam that separate dumb retail consumers from their
| thousands. That's why the dumb billionaires are interested
| in it.
|
| A more logical solution might be to _not run society on
| bullshit_ , but that seems to be beyond the capabilities of
| most humans.
| janalsncm wrote:
| From personal experience, I've saved hundreds of hours
| with ChatGPT already. It can piece together large neural
| nets in PyTorch that would take me an hour or more to get
| right, or annoying pieces of code which I don't feel like
| correlating the disparate pieces of online info for. Of
| course I will review it and unit test it to make sure it
| works, but I honestly make more mistakes integrating it
| in my larger project than ChatGPT does in the code
| itself. And this is on the free version.
|
| There are limitations of course but I've been impressed
| more often than not.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >A more logical solution might be to not run society on
| bullshit
|
| And this is why you're poor. In fact, depending on your
| definition of bullshit, if you did not run society on
| bullshit there wouldn't be billionaires at all. Once you
| reach the level of technology that can provide for
| everyone, what need is there to make more?
|
| >The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the
| unreasonable one persists to adapt the world to himself.
| Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
| adventured wrote:
| > Once you reach the level of technology that can provide
| for everyone, what need is there to make more?
|
| Because you can never reach that outcome no matter what
| your technology is.
|
| Your premise is so vague as to be useless. Provide what
| for everyone? How much for everyone? Who decides how much
| for everyone? Based on what? Elected by whom?
|
| If you actually dig into any of that what you'll find is
| that it's impossible. Unless you use a hyper violent
| authoritarian model that dictates every minute of every
| person's life. Otherwise, one person will always have
| different needs than another person, without exception
| (and that's so varied we could be here all day listing
| the differing ways, from freak health situations to
| genetics to activity choices).
|
| And that's just on matters of basic needs. Then we get
| into luxuries, any and all things people want beyond
| basic needs. And then you have to debate the extent to
| which people require some manner of luxuries beyond basic
| needs in order to actually continue to exist in a healthy
| manner. And then you have to get into who decides on
| that, who dictates which people get which luxuries, if
| indeed it's decided people require some level of luxury
| in their life.
|
| And that's just scratching the surface at a minimum for
| why the premise: once technology has provided for
| everyone - entirely implodes upon any inspection at all.
| It never can, it never will. Human desire is infinite up
| to the point of expiration. That includes the desire for
| new experiences (can people live without new experiences?
| doubtful, certainly they'll live horrific miserable lives
| without such), which is a gigantic envelope of things
| unto itself, beyond the basic needs category. Who decides
| what new experiences everyone has access to? How much
| allocation to that? And on and on and on it goes.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >Human desire is infinite up to the point of expiration.
|
| No, the only thing infinite is human greed, the
| difference between greed and desire is desire can make
| concessions for the needs of others, greed will burn down
| the world to get exactly what it wants.
|
| > And then you have to get into who decides on that
|
| As technology concentrates power, it will be the
| authoritarian leader. Putin is a great example of this.
| Greed driving him and Russia to ruin.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| nickelbob wrote:
| Please do - not trying to be snarky, just legitimately
| interested.
| swamp40 wrote:
| If you can train a machine using video, and get it to
| repeat what you have taught it...and then manufacture
| millions of them - you have an (almost)-zero-marginal-cost
| revolution just like you had for software development.
|
| Plus, it's replacing $$$ humans. 4X the productivity while
| paying for itself in a few months.
| nemothekid wrote:
| > _If you can train a machine using video, and get it to
| repeat what you have taught it_
|
| I might be wrong, but from what I know about Transformer
| models and neural nets in general, what you are
| describing sounds a lot closer to something like an AGI.
|
| When you say "train a machine" here it sounds a lot
| closer to "teach a machine" rather than "finding weights
| and baises for an existing function".
|
| I think we are still a ways off from AGI.
| swyx wrote:
| each of these are known >$100m opportunities:
|
| Generative Text for writing - Jasper AI going 0 to $75m ARR
| in 2 years
|
| Generative Art for non-artists - Midjourney/Stable
| Diffusion
|
| Copilot for knowledge workers - both GitHub's Copilot X and
| "Copilot for X"
|
| Conversational AI UX - ChatGPT / Bing Chat, with a long
| tail of Doc QA startups
|
| (shameless plug from https://www.latent.space/p/agents)
| woah wrote:
| Do they have a moat though? When MS Office integrates a
| more powerful model than is even available to Jasper
| right into the word processor, what happens?
| nibab wrote:
| I think there are some killer products, but the surface
| area here is not that big. I can definitely see how we
| can improve on all of the above, but at the rate things
| are developing right now, you're looking at smaller and
| specialized models as the underlying infrastructure.
| Keeping the conversation focused on Anthropic, unless
| there is promise of some specific functions outside this
| range that require big powerful models, they're in
| trouble.
|
| There is a world in which the dust settles and the
| current "era" of AI doesn't actually result in a
| significant amount of productivity/value creation and
| capture thereof. Everything rests on the current
| assumption that emergent behaviors and some semblance of
| consciousness can extrapolate infinitely. You have to
| believe that in order to justify the investments we're
| currently seeing in some of the big players.
| localhost wrote:
| character.ai
| htrp wrote:
| > Generative Text for writing - Jasper AI going 0 to $75m
| ARR in 2 years
|
| And laying off a ton of staff in July..... the latest ARR
| numbers are not nearly as good.
| janalsncm wrote:
| ChatGPT is the killer product for text. It has rough edges,
| but in a lot of cases it is far better than Google. Maybe it
| won't kill Google but it will hurt. If you think it
| hallucinates too much, well I have bad news for you about the
| future of content on the open internet too.
|
| I'm pretty bearish on all of the other ChatGPT API call apps:
| I don't see how limiting ChatGPT to a specific use case is
| adding value for me.
| alberth wrote:
| > " 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.
| cowsandmilk wrote:
| > AWS gets to reduce its profits by making this investment,
| which means they pay less taxes.
|
| That's not how it works. If they buy 4 billion of shares, they
| then have an asset worth 4 billion. No impact to profit.
| anonylizard wrote:
| 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.
| inoop wrote:
| AWS 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).
| alberth wrote:
| > _"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 wrote:
| 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.
| martinald wrote:
| That's not how it works. The investment is an asset on the
| balance sheet, it is very unlikely to reduce taxable profits. I
| don't know the US corporation tax situation much, but if it's
| anything like the UK then you couldn't use that to offset
| profits for the year. You could if the investment failed, but
| then you've lost a lot more money than the tax saving (as
| you've lost the entire $4bn investment).
|
| You might be right that Anthropic could then spend that money
| back with AWS, but that would again be subject to tax on any
| profits it generates for AWS. Also, if they spent (say) $2bn of
| the money with AWS but had nothing to show for it, when
| Anthropic raises again you'd expect the valuation to decrease
| substantially.
|
| I very much doubt it is a tax saving mechanism, nor do I think
| it is a particularly good way to juice sales (compared to
| spending say $4bn on marketing, or discounts, or whatever).
| dist-epoch wrote:
| > _AWS gets to reduce its profits by making this investment,
| which means they pay less taxes._
|
| This has been Amazon strategy for a long long time now, almost
| two decades.
|
| But Bezos views this in a different way, not as an accounting
| trick to look good to investors, but as a way to kill the
| competition, since you have lower costs by not paying taxes, so
| you can redirect a part of what would have been taxes to
| attract customers (lower prices, excellent customer support,
| ...)
| alephnerd wrote:
| > 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.
| baq wrote:
| If this means alexa isn't a pet rock that can only reliably set
| timers, good for them.
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| It's also good at setting alarms.
| aaron695 wrote:
| [dead]
| Semaphor wrote:
| And converting weird US units to sane ones.
| dboreham wrote:
| There were a few weeks recently when she couldn't even set
| timers (the timer wasn't displayed on the screen leading to
| constant "Alexa, show me the timer" requests).
| vinay_ys wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Old siri goes online, the new series 10 watch stuff is local,
| so might be better? Holding my breath lol .
| georgeecollins wrote:
| Voice computing is in the trough of despair. Tech companies
| over-invested in them. They aren't the next iphone (nothing
| will be). But like millions of homes we have two that we use
| for a few things. Expect improvements at a disappointing pace,
| leading to improved utility.
|
| Many dunked on the apple watch, but it keeps getting better.
| Meta's next headset will be disappointing to some but have an
| audience and keep improving. etc.
| Yizahi wrote:
| Everyone has already moved to the much superior Alex.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0_Tt0En7v4
| IanCal wrote:
| 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.
| gwd wrote:
| 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.</s>
|
| (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 same song at all,
| and has a very clear F-bomb 5 seconds in.)
| manmal wrote:
| I asked Siri today about the current week number (in
| German), and it failed. Just when I thought I've lowered my
| expectations enough, Siri can do one "better".
| schoen wrote:
| It might be a European vs. American cultural thing
| because week number is much less used in America, and
| Siri was developed by Americans. Maybe this is more of a
| localization failure than a generic functionality
| failure.
|
| If it gave you an answer that seemed wrong, well, there
| are also several slightly different definitions of week
| number, so it could be that it chose one that wasn't the
| one you expected (maybe also a localization failure).
| 3c0 wrote:
| siri is honestly only good for basic question/answers.
| like "how is the weather going to be later" or "play X
| song", or "how old is X". i wish they integrated LLMs
| into personal assistants to truly have a conversational
| type experience
| IanCal wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| philshem wrote:
| I am not a Google Home or Alexa user, and I honestly can't
| tell if this is meant to be sarcastic.
| djjzjshdhhd wrote:
| 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.
| IanCal wrote:
| 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.
| pgeorgi wrote:
| > play 90's rock ... some animal documentary ... not too
| far from the truth
|
| Bloodhound Gang - The Bad Touch?
| jaggederest wrote:
| only somewhat sarcastic. At least once a week Alexa will
| play an off the wall unrelated song or a crazy cover of the
| desired song.
| IanCal wrote:
| 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.
| scns wrote:
| > Then one time it returned the triple J version by the
| Psychedelic Porn Crumpets
|
| The name made me laugh out loud but the recommends
| delivered this:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtua5kEsbGX_1HhY4O
| QAg...
|
| Allready diggin the first one of 100. Thank you sooo
| much!
| scns wrote:
| > Then one time it returned the triple J version by the
| Psychedelic Porn Crumpets
|
| The name made me laugh out loud but the recommends
| delivered this:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtua5kEsbGX_1HhY4O
| QAg...
|
| Allready diggin the first one of 100, 95 to go. Thank
| you!
| IanCal wrote:
| If you like this kind of thing, also checkout the radio 1
| live lounge stuff. Been going for a long time so I think
| there's playlists with a couple of hundred songs and
| they'll be a small amount of the full sets. Often tends
| towards more acoustic but you can find some great covers.
| donor20 wrote:
| Somehow people have polluted and/or the assistants are too
| stupid to play well known songs from voice prompts. You get
| weird covers with clearly synthesized backing or random
| crap. It's honestly weird. The covers shouldn't even be on
| system half the time.
| usui wrote:
| It is, or at least facetious
| starbugs wrote:
| That's the only thing I am using it for and I'd prefer if it
| stays that way.
| makestuff wrote:
| They announced Alexa powered by some new LLM last week.
| Apparently it will go into beta sometime later this year.
| tinyhouse wrote:
| That's their in-house LLM though. Amazon prefers investing
| $4B into Anthropic rather than using their own stuff. If you
| ask me, long ago they should've taken the top ML and
| engineering talent from Alexa and let them focus on building
| an in-house Openai/Anthropic. Then the engineers who left in
| Alexa could just integrate that stuff, as of the rest of the
| company (AWS, retail, etc).
| brooksbp wrote:
| I'm still waiting for the day Google Assistant can answer "what
| time does Home Depot open in the morning?"
|
| GA: "I found 3 locations, which one?"
|
| Me: "The closest one"
|
| GA: "I found 3 locations, which one?"
|
| ...
| kaibee wrote:
| What was the point of feeding Google all my location history
| data if it can't even figure out which Wegmans I go to?
| riku_iki wrote:
| google assistant is probably still not Bard powered, so it
| just means someone didn't coded some rule: user asked
| "closest one" -> locate user location -> locate home depot
| closest to that location
| digging wrote:
| This is how I feel about pretty much all the most data-
| hungry services. It's never been about an improved use
| experience, because the quality is not there.
|
| I can't count how many times I yelled/cried about Spotify
| trying to learn every mood I've ever felt (and what song
| would have been perfect for the moment!) only to play the
| same 4 songs over and over because I listened to one of
| them on purpose a week ago. (I no longer use Spotify. We'll
| see if Tidal falls into the same trap.)
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| Even better if they all open at the same time, which is the
| case near me
| malfist wrote:
| Like what type of input where they expecting here?
|
| Alexa does the same thing talking to smart devices.
|
| Me: Alexa, turn of the loft lights
|
| Alexa: A few things share the name "loft" which one did you
| mean?
|
| Me: Can you list them?
|
| Alexa: I did not find a device named "can you list them loft"
| travisjungroth wrote:
| This reads like a sad variation of the traveling salesman
| problem.
| donbox wrote:
| also good for "Alexa, how is the weather today?"
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