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This is not how it works.

First, revenue is irrelevant.

Second, the investment isn't a loan that they need to repay. They are getting equity.

Third, Anthropic is exclusively using AWS to train its models. Which, yes, means if AWS gives them $4B and it costs them $500M/year to pay for AWS services then after 8 years, the cash is a wash. However this ignores the second point.

Fourth, there is brand association for someone who wanted to run their own single tenant instance of Claude whereby you would say "well they train Claude on AWS, so that must be the best place to run it for our <insert Enterprise org>" similar to OpenAI on Azure.

Fifth, raising money is a signaling exercise to larger markets who want to know "will this company exist in 5 years?"

Sixth, AWS doesn't have its own LLM (relative to Meta, MS, etc.). The market will associate Claude with Amazon now.

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warkdarrior 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Sixth, AWS doesn't have its own LLM (relative to Meta, MS, etc.). The market will associate Claude with Amazon now.

Amazon/AWS has their line of Titan LLMs: https://aws.amazon.com/bedrock/titan/

	▲	mbesto 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Fair. I wasn't aware of that, for the same reason that if you search Titan vs Claude on HN, you'll find way more mentions of Claude: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... I think its fair to say this is also a hedging strategy then.

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whatshisface 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

The difference between things you'd say like "it's true that..." and "the market will associate..." basically is the definition of a scam.

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Spooky23 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

It’s not a scam at all. Amazon doesn’t have an AI story. So they invest in Anthropic, get a lot of that money back as revenue that seeds demand.

Their customers now have an incentive to do AI in AWS. That drives more revenue for AWS.

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donavanm 3 days ago | parent [-]

> Amazon doesn’t have an AI story.

A quibble: AWS _does_ have an AI story (which i was originally dismissive of): Bedrock as a common interface and platform to access your model of choice, plus niceties for fine tuning/embeddings/customization etc. Unlike say Azure theyre not betting on _a_ implementation. Theyre betting that competition/results between models will trend towards parity with limited fundamental differentiation. Its a bet on enterprises wanting the _functionality_ more generally and being able to ramp up that usage via AWS spend.

WRT titan my view is that its 1) production r&d to stay “in the game” 2) a path towards commoditization and lower structural costs, which companies will need if these capabilities are going to stick/have roi in low cost transactions.

	▲	Spooky23 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Sure they do, but it doesn’t have a ton of traction relative to the size of AWS.

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mbesto 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Ummm okay? A scam implies someone is getting hurt (financially, emotionally, etc.). Who's getting scammed here?

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whatshisface 3 days ago | parent [-]

The big tech companies are spending enormous amounts for part ownership in startups whose only assets are knowledge that exists in the public domain, systems that the companies could have engineered themselves, and model weights trained with the buyer's own capital. The people who will get hurt are public investors who are having their investment used to make a few startup people really rich.

	▲	prewett 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> whose only assets are knowledge Knowledge is quite the useful asset, and not easily obtained. People obtain knowledge by studying for years and years, and even then, one might obtain information rather than knowledge, or have some incorrect knowledge. The AI companies have engineered a system that (by your argument) distills knowledge from artifacts (books, blogs, etc.) that contain statements, filler, opinions, facts, misleading arguments, incorrect arguments, as well as knowledge and perhaps even wisdom. Apparently this takes hundreds of millions of dollars (at least) to do for one model. But, assuming they actually have distilled out knowledge, that would be valuable. Although, since the barrier to entry is pretty low, they should not expect sustained high profits. (The barrier is costly, but so is the barrier to entry to new airlines--a few planes cost as much as an AI model--yet new airlines start up regularly and nobody really makes much profit. Hence, I conclude that requiring a large amount of money is not necessarily a barrier to entry.) (Also, I argue that they have not actually distilled out knowledge, they have merely created a system that is about as good at word association as the average human. This is not knowledge, although it may have its own uses.)
	▲	kelnos 3 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		If they could build it themselves, why haven't they? Say what you want about Amazon, but I find it hard to believe that Anthropic bamboozled them into believing they can't build their own AI when they could do it cheaper.
	▲	PittleyDunkin 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		If the scam only hurts investors i'd say it's likely a net benefit to humanity.