Google Invests Another $1 Billion in AI Developer Anthropic

Alphabet's Google is backing AI developer Anthropic with a further $1 billion, building its stake in one of the most promising rivals to OpenAI. From a report: The new funding comes in addition to more than $2 billion that Google has already invested in Anthropic, according to a person familiar with the deal, who asked not to be named discussing a private matter. Google has a business agreement with Anthropic that covers the use of a suite of online tools and services.

Amazon counts among its biggest backers. San Francisco-based Anthropic is best known for its Claude family of large language models, which compete with OpenAI's GPT. Like its peers, the company has been raising significant sums to sustain investment in expanding its computing capabilities and keep pace in a race to advance AI. The new deal comes weeks after Bloomberg News reported that Anthropic is in advanced talks to raise $2 billion in a funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners that would value the startup at $60 billion.

Investing

[rlwinm]

Google isn't the smartest when it comes to investing. They dumped billions into plenty of other failures. MagicLeap comes to mind but they haven't always had a great ROI.

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[nightflameauto]

Billion dollars here, billion dollars there, pretty soon you'll be talking real money.

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[gtall]

The quote, ostensibly from Everett Dirksen, is:

      A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon, you're talking real money.

Pepsi

[TomClancy_Jack]

I feel like unless you're super interested in AI personally or professionally, Claude is always going to be the equivariant of "Is Pepsi ok?" when you order coke at a restaurant. I think for your average consumer, if they think about AI, they think about ChatGPT and that is going to be hard to beat.

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[Rei]

For coders, Claude 3,5 Sonnet is where it's at. The vast majority of people using Cursor choose it (in agent mode) as their model.

Love seeing Anthropic get more funding. OpenAI gets all the headlines and makes a lot of flashy stuff, but Anthropic delivers the goods.

Generative AI - Is it good for anything?

[andrewz]

I'm not the only one who thinks LLM is crap. Gartner also doesn't think it will be profitable:
https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/22/business_value_genai_elusive/

This kind of $ Billion expenditures are not sustainable and there will be a stock market correction.
Probably sooner.

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[Rei]

They can all be profitable at will today if they just stop training new foundations. Inference is quite profitable.

They, obviously, don't want to because they're not interested in a piece of today's pie, but fighting over who gets the biggest chunk of what they expect to be a far bigger pie in the future.

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[gweihir]

Bullshit. But useful idiots like you are a part of what keeps the hype going. And continues the waste of money.

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[DamnOregonian]

They're completely correct- inference is profitable today.
It's the production of new models that makes the incorrectly lumped together market seem unprofitable.
If you could pull your head out of your ass, you'd see that the goal is to build a bigger market for the more profitable inference- and that takes newer and better models that people need to run inference on.

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[gweihir]

Gartner finally being honest about this question is a milestone on the way to the end of this insanity.

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[nightflameauto]

Gartner finally being honest about this question is a milestone on the way to the end of this insanity.

Gonna be a *LONG* tail on this beast though. There's a whole sub-business already around pushing this shit into every facet of IT work, and making up pithy catch-phrases about how you either jump on board or you'll get run over, or the only jobs left will be those who "interface" with the AI, or all kinds of other nonsense about how important it is to buy hard into the hype. And management types seem to swoon over this shit. I'm not sure, even if the actuality collapses, the fantasy will leave us for a good

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[fatwilbur]

To the stock market correction part, I highly doubt it. Remember these are multi-trillion dollar companies, $1B here or $10B there is a fraction of their market cap (and thus ability to recapitalize) or even their cash hoards. These aren't even close to the "blockbuster" deals on buying crap like Yahoo that could have potentially brought them down in the past.

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[DamnOregonian]

Not sustainable??
MS funded its R&D dept with like a 99.9% product failure rate at billions for decades when that was a lot more money than it is now.
The Googles of the world can afford to literally collect billions into a pile and burn them annually just for show.