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.

> 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.