The largest LLMs are mostly going to be running in the cloud, so the general purpose cloud providers (Amazon, Microsoft, Google) are presumably going to be in the business of serving models, but that doesn't necessarily mean they need to build the models themselves.

LLMs look to be shaping up as an interchangeable commodity as training datasets, at least for general purpose use, converge to the limits of the available data, so access to customers seems just as important, if not more, than the models themselves. It seems it just takes money to build a SOTA LLM, but the cloud providers have more of a moat, so customer access is perhaps the harder part.

Amazon do of course have a close relationship with Anthropic both for training and serving models, which seems like a natural fit given the whole picture of who's in bed with who, especially as Anthropic and Amazon are both focused on business customers.

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GloriousMEEPT 6 days ago | parent [-]

Microsoft is building it's own in-house LLM's based on OpenAI's IP. Google builds it's own models.

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HarHarVeryFunny 6 days ago | parent [-]

Sure, but you can also sell something without having built it yourself, just as Microsoft Copilot supports OpenAI and Anthropic models.

It doesn't have to be either/or of course - a cloud provider may well support a range of models, some developed in house and some not.

Vertical integration - a cloud provider building everything they sell - isn't necessarily the most logical business model. Sometimes it makes more sense to buy from a supplier, giving up a bit of margin, than build yourself.

	▲	GloriousMEEPT 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		I'm just an observer. Microsoft has invested billions in OpenAI and can access their IP as a result. It might even be possible MS hopes that OpenAI fails and doesn't allow them to restructure to continue to acquire outside funding. You can go directly to the announcement of their in-house model offerings and they are clearly using this as a recruiting tool for talent. Whether it makes sense for the cloud providers to build their own models is not for me to say, but they may not have a choice given how quickly OpenAI/Anthropic are burning cash. If those two fail then they're essentially ceding the market to Google.