Amazon Spends $2.75 Billion on AI Startup Anthropic in Its Largest Venture Investment Yet (cnbc.com) 10
Amazon is making its largest outside investment in its three-decade history as it looks to gain an edge in the AI race. From a report: The tech giant said it will spend another $2.75 billion backing Anthropic, a San Francisco-based startup that's widely viewed as a frontrunner in generative artificial intelligence. Its foundation model and chatbot Claude competes with OpenAI and ChatGPT. The companies announced an initial $1.25 billion investment in September, and said at the time that Amazon would invest up to $4 billion. Wednesday's news marks Amazon's second tranche of that funding.
Amazon will maintain a minority stake in the company and won't have an Anthropic board seat, the company said. The deal was struck at the AI startup's last valuation, which was $18.4 billion, according to a source. Over the past year, Anthropic closed five different funding deals worth about $7.3 billion -- and with the new Amazon investment, the total exceeds $10 billion. The company's product directly competes with OpenAI's ChatGPT in both the enterprise and consumer worlds, and it was founded by ex-OpenAI research executives and employees.
Amazon will maintain a minority stake in the company and won't have an Anthropic board seat, the company said. The deal was struck at the AI startup's last valuation, which was $18.4 billion, according to a source. Over the past year, Anthropic closed five different funding deals worth about $7.3 billion -- and with the new Amazon investment, the total exceeds $10 billion. The company's product directly competes with OpenAI's ChatGPT in both the enterprise and consumer worlds, and it was founded by ex-OpenAI research executives and employees.
This will be a fun (and well-documented) journey (Score:1)
Step 1: Buy promising startup or tech company with an interesting product.
Step 2: Enshitify it and try to milk it for profit while twisting it to fit into the Amazon ecosystem somehow.
Step 3: Realize you can't make money with this product in the state you've put it in, and abandon it while laying people off and citing 'lack of interest' as the cause.
RIP Anthropic. We hardly new ye.
Re: (Score:2)
Amazon isn't buying Anthropic. They have invested $4 billion at a reported $18.4 billion valuation, meaning Amazon owns a little over 20% of the company. Google invested $2 billion, and there has been another $1.3 billion in funding over the past year from other sources. So while Amazon is a large stakeholder at Anthropic, they won't own the company. Google is investing billions too, and wouldn't be doing that if the company's future is to just be Amazon's lapdog.
Re: (Score:2)
My brother in christ... no. It's the same way that Microsoft doesn't "own" OpenAI but basically controls their direction.
That's It? (Score:4, Funny)
They sank a billion dollars on a TV show about some chick who beats up fifteen-foot-tall ogres. I think there was an elf in it.
AI companies need computational power and data (Score:3)
And Big Data has both.
So the AI companies' entire game is to find themselves a Big Data sugar daddy. OpenAI is Microsoft's bitch, and now Anthropic is Amazon's.
All I see here is Big Data entrenching their monopolies and turbocharging the dystopia.
Anthropic overtook OpenAI on huggingface leaderboa (Score:3)
https://huggingface.co/spaces/... [huggingface.co]
Re: (Score:3)
I was a little surprised to see ChatGPT 4 lose the lead to Claude 3 Opus, seems like it was on top for eons:
https://huggingface.co/spaces/... [huggingface.co]
The difference between #1 and #2 is 2 points, with a confidence interval of at least +/-4. That is, the two are statistically similar.
Of course, that's even assuming that a competition based on crowd-sourced human preference votes means something. If anything, this contest measures popularity, but it probably means much less than that due to methodology holes.
Re: (Score:2)
Claude can be useful. I haven't upgraded to pro yet, is the top of the line any good at math?
RIP (Score:2, Funny)
To quote my ex: "Well, that was over quickly."
Amazon already has an edge (Score:1)
Amazon controls the marketplace for hosted apps: AWS. All they need to do is re-tool for AI devs/products. But focusing on LLMs that inherently cannot scale is the wrong move. It's funny, the bigger a company gets, the dumber and slower it gets.