Google agrees to invest up to $2B in OpenAI rival Anthropic

Re:Google agrees to invest up to $2B in OpenAI rival Anthropic by mattnewton on Saturday October 28, 2023 @01:07PM (#38051497)

Google has astronomical sums of cash and so many hands that the left hand often doesn’t know what the hundreds of right hands know. My point is $2B can be considered a side bet to make sure if their own efforts fail there is a serious competitor to open ai to buy or license by finance people without knowledge of how their own internal modeling efforts are going.

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Re:Google agrees to invest up to $2B in OpenAI rival Anthropic by fauigerzigerk on Saturday October 28, 2023 @01:20PM (#38051634)

>...a side bet to make sure if their own efforts fail there is a serious competitor...

My point is that this is not how a healthy company can think about its most strategic activities. This sort of failure is not something you can hedge against.

It's like Apple hedging against the risk of failing to keep iPhone competitive by investing in some other device maker that might be able to compete with Samsung.

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Re:Google agrees to invest up to $2B in OpenAI rival Anthropic by mattnewton on Saturday October 28, 2023 @01:42PM (#38051863)

I don’t think it’s anything like that example, google is an advertising conglomerate not an LLM api company. Anthropic is like a camera company when apple first started making phones in your analogy. Going to become a very important feature to be sure, but not a competing device maker.

By failure I don’t mean they can’t make an LLM product, I mean the LLM product doesn’t have majority market share to be used as an ad surface (or other monetization strategy). That’s only partly dependent on their research and modeling efforts. The revenues they could make from an LLM api business are too small to register for them right now, the market share and product work is also important.

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Re:Google agrees to invest up to $2B in OpenAI rival Anthropic by fauigerzigerk on Saturday October 28, 2023 @02:10PM (#38052052)

I disagree. Google's entire advertising business depends on them being the best at "organising the world's information". (Apple says Google is the best, so it must be true, right? :)

If Google fails to compete in AI, they will lose search and some competitor will siphon off all their advertisig revenue.

This is all coinciding with regulators taking a closer look at all the other ways in which Google protects its search monopoly. You know, the ones that are not so much based on merit.

Google is at risk of losing both its technology leadership and its grip on distribution channels at the same time.

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Re:Google agrees to invest up to $2B in OpenAI rival Anthropic by mattnewton on Saturday October 28, 2023 @02:26PM (#38052194)

I don’t see the risk at all. Google has a LLM product with much more reach and better monetization than anthropic already. If you think the DOJ is going to break up google or otherwise destroy their market share in search that’s another story altogether, but if they keep it they’ll be well positioned to make a lot of money buying anthropic and getting their models onto their infrastructure and in their channels. It’d be like buying YouTube, which had absolutely nothing to do with needing their video hosting infrastructure but because they were winning market share with their product decisions.

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