> At the heart of this deal is Amazon’s custom chips: Graviton (a low-power CPU) and Trainium (an Nvidia competitor and AI accelerator chip). The Anthropic deal ...
Yeah, totally not desperately seeking investment to keep the party going ...
With chip development you need scale in order to get to the edge. It makes sense to finance demand so you can get to scale it's not like it's a ponzi scheme.
Anthropic gets access to limited compute resources and Amazon gets demand to justify increased R&D and capex + feedback from the best users in the field.
> I mostly see their products as commodity at this point, with strong open source contenders.
I have seen this argument made a lot, but llm serving being a commodity makes it _better_ for them not worse.
If it's a commodity, then you are entirely competing on price, and the players that will win on price will be the largest ones, because they can find efficiencies that smaller competitors won't have.
It's actually the small LLM companies that are in trouble if LLM serving commoditizes. They will need to distinguish themselves on features, because they can't compete on price. And even there the big labs will have an advantage.
Coding agents are getting deployed wall to wall in most if not all of the major tech companies. Many have no token limits - spend as much as you want as long as you have a good story to tell.
Companies bake their workflows into these tools. Internal processes start to be written up around specific tools. Once something works, it gets pushed out at scale for all to copy.
Anthropic hit $30B in revenue and this is just the start of coding being deployed at scale. Hard to look past these numbers at this point
If you think you need to spend $100B, does using a third-party cloud provider still make sense? It doesn’t matter what sweet deal Amazon is pitching—in that scenario, you’d want to own your stack. Especially in a hyper-competitive field like this, where margins are going to matter a lot soon.
It feels like these hyperscalers are just raising as much as they can giving extremely rosy projections becauses these sooner or later peak is going to be reached (if that hasn’t happened already)
My guess is they are bound not by capital as much as they are physical resources. Amazon probably has the land, crews, etc. to build out more data centers faster than Anthropic can right now. The scarce resources are the chips and electricians not the money!
They're not trying to build a sustainable business. They're trying to get as much market share and lock-in as possible before the bubble bursts. This makes a ton of sense from that perspective. It probably would be cheaper for them in the long run to own their own hardware, but they are paying AWS for their expertise so they can focus on what they do. If it doesn't work out, it also sets them up for a merger with Amazon.
I do think a ton of businesses would benefit from running their own hardware, but they're not getting five billion dollars to stay on the cloud.
I'm no economist, but how exactly does this make sense? Amazon is basically just giving them 5B which will then be used to repay them back 20x that amount??
The $5B isn't a gift. Amazon is buying shares for $5B, and they're getting a spending commitment. I don't have any insight into the agreement, but on a ten year $100B spending commitment, I would expect $5B to be spent in no more than 3 years, and likely sooner.
In my reading, Amazon is giving $5B of usage credits in exchange for shares. If Anthropic works out, it's a good deal for Amazon. If it doesn't, they lose on their invesment sheet, but they got ~ $5B in revenue, so it looks good on their operating sheet. And it helped justify a build out that they can sell to others.
For Anthropic, this lets them operate for more time without having to make numbers work. If Anthropic works out, they'll figure out the $100B commitment later. If it doesn't work out, it's not their problem.
It's probably faster to build up amazon's capacity with amazon's money than to build owned capacity with someone else's money at the scale they're looking to build out.
Sounds like moneygrab is accelerating before consumer grade local models are getting good enough for local inference in few years. Huge house of cards here. Demand skyrocketing until it’s suddenly dropping entirely with ondevice inference.
I think when they rack up the RAM prices, they should pay for the damage they caused here. I don't need AI anywhere, but the increase in RAM prices is annoying me. Thankfully I purchased new RAM for a new computer, say, 3 years ago, so I can hold out for the most part - but sooner or later I have to purchase a new computer, and I really don't see why I should pay more, solely due to AI companies and greedy hardware manufacturers. Simple-minded capitalism does not work - I consider this a racket as well as collusion.
Tulip Corp has reached a definitive finance agreement with Rhine. Rhine will invest 5 Billion guilders in Tulip Corp, and Tulip Corp will be buying 100 Billion guilders of fertilizer and irrigation water from Rhine. This helps Tulip Corp ensure that it's critical infrastructure needs are met.
Does anyone feel that the jig is almost up? Surely the returns aren’t anywhere close to what investors expect with the sheer amount of cash at this point in time.
Are Anthropic and OpenAI rushing to IPO for immediate cash so they can delay the inevitable? Surely this cycle of robbing Peter to pay Paul to pay John to pay Tim must end.
We are only just now getting a taste of the “true cost” of these tokens. Then there is a lack of compute bottlenecking everything. Even now I’m looking at the 7.5x rate of tokens for Opus 4.7
Open models are promising and cost a fraction of what they proprietary models cost which the big two are vulnerable to when companies start to feel the cost of tokens.
Will data centres be built fast enough and powered sufficiently to lower the cost of compute thus tokens?
Is it just a giant Hail Mary to get to AGI ASAP before the economy collapses?
Above all else, I simply feel the models have plateaued. I am noticing productivity loss for tasks I deem as “complex”
46 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 61.5 ms ] threadYeah, totally not desperately seeking investment to keep the party going ...
Anthropic gets access to limited compute resources and Amazon gets demand to justify increased R&D and capex + feedback from the best users in the field.
I mostly see their products as commodity at this point, with strong open source contenders.
Eventually it will become hard to justify the premium on these models.
I have seen this argument made a lot, but llm serving being a commodity makes it _better_ for them not worse.
If it's a commodity, then you are entirely competing on price, and the players that will win on price will be the largest ones, because they can find efficiencies that smaller competitors won't have.
It's actually the small LLM companies that are in trouble if LLM serving commoditizes. They will need to distinguish themselves on features, because they can't compete on price. And even there the big labs will have an advantage.
Companies bake their workflows into these tools. Internal processes start to be written up around specific tools. Once something works, it gets pushed out at scale for all to copy.
Anthropic hit $30B in revenue and this is just the start of coding being deployed at scale. Hard to look past these numbers at this point
It feels like these hyperscalers are just raising as much as they can giving extremely rosy projections becauses these sooner or later peak is going to be reached (if that hasn’t happened already)
I do think a ton of businesses would benefit from running their own hardware, but they're not getting five billion dollars to stay on the cloud.
In my reading, Amazon is giving $5B of usage credits in exchange for shares. If Anthropic works out, it's a good deal for Amazon. If it doesn't, they lose on their invesment sheet, but they got ~ $5B in revenue, so it looks good on their operating sheet. And it helped justify a build out that they can sell to others.
For Anthropic, this lets them operate for more time without having to make numbers work. If Anthropic works out, they'll figure out the $100B commitment later. If it doesn't work out, it's not their problem.
It's probably faster to build up amazon's capacity with amazon's money than to build owned capacity with someone else's money at the scale they're looking to build out.
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-invests...
I think when they rack up the RAM prices, they should pay for the damage they caused here. I don't need AI anywhere, but the increase in RAM prices is annoying me. Thankfully I purchased new RAM for a new computer, say, 3 years ago, so I can hold out for the most part - but sooner or later I have to purchase a new computer, and I really don't see why I should pay more, solely due to AI companies and greedy hardware manufacturers. Simple-minded capitalism does not work - I consider this a racket as well as collusion.
Are Anthropic and OpenAI rushing to IPO for immediate cash so they can delay the inevitable? Surely this cycle of robbing Peter to pay Paul to pay John to pay Tim must end.
We are only just now getting a taste of the “true cost” of these tokens. Then there is a lack of compute bottlenecking everything. Even now I’m looking at the 7.5x rate of tokens for Opus 4.7
Open models are promising and cost a fraction of what they proprietary models cost which the big two are vulnerable to when companies start to feel the cost of tokens.
Will data centres be built fast enough and powered sufficiently to lower the cost of compute thus tokens?
Is it just a giant Hail Mary to get to AGI ASAP before the economy collapses?
Above all else, I simply feel the models have plateaued. I am noticing productivity loss for tasks I deem as “complex”