Amazon bets another $4B on Anthropic Amid concerns about the return of AI winter, when funding and advancements slow down, neural-network golden child Anthropic reports the doubling of Amazon's already substantial financial backing. It was only back in March that Amazon finished shoveling $4 billion into Anthropic, maker of the Claude family of generative models …
That's what happens when Google's Knight Templar's Temple of Solomon has no moat, and AWS' Knights of the Round Table's King Arthur has no clothes (in its own closet mind) and so badly needs Claude's Anthropic-fitting pants, right now, stat, bad!
But why bicker over medieval fashion and torture when you might just get an equivalent Sutskever for a potential early-discovery discount? Go for the stealthy safe SSI Sundar, says I, protect the dungeon, don't let other's pantless madness make you miss the merry moat's motion, once more, again! ... or so I'm told ... (or not?)
Can you believe that I was well into my IT career (over a decade) before I realized that company owners/CEOs view paying employees as a negative, not a plus? Their "We're all in this together" speeches successfully brainwashed me, I guess. I'm not sure whether I was naive or just plain dumb (the latter, I'm betting).
I had noticed much earlier there was a phenomenon I called "Not knowing where their money comes from", where failed businesses had spent mega cash on everything except what actually produced the money, say a ditch-digging business spending all their money on everything except ditch-diggers and shovels. Finally I was with a company where the owner regularly stated in no uncertain terms that he knew for a fact that the company would be much better off if not for having to pay "all these technicians's salaries". (A 3-year-old can see how faulty that concept is)
Amazon is "investing" $8 billion into Anthropic. Microsoft has committed $14 billion to OpenAI.
The only motivation for such mad investment is fear: they think they'll lose a big chunk of their market share if they don't do it.
To be fair to Microsoft and Amazon, investing in the PC did extend IBM's period at the top by a few years. Apple has fallen well behind in the AI race (their success has come from building world-beating products, but they haven't done this since 2010 (the iPad)), and people are noticing - but it hasn't affected their share price yet. When Apple do get some decent AI, they'll get it much more cheaply than either Amazon and Microsoft have.
As a spectator, it's jolly good sport, and rather good fun to watch!
Apple seems to be a bit more realistically sedated about AI hype than many tech co-conspirators imho. To wit, just last month, "six Apple engineers [showed] that the mathematical "reasoning" displayed by advanced large language models can be extremely brittle and unreliable", readily led astray by "red herrings".
It's refeshing ... (for now at least)
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