Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and XAI Granted Up to $200M from Defense Department

Re:Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and XAI Granted Up to $200M fro... by clarle on Monday July 14, 2025 @06:10PM (#44565890)

Are Amazon and Meta the ones losing out the most here, in terms of the companies building foundational models?

Probably more understandable for Meta, since they've been leaving the B2B space since Workplace has been sunset. Amazon losing out on this is pretty rough for AWS though.

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Re:Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and XAI Granted Up to $200M fro... by paxys on Monday July 14, 2025 @06:33PM (#44566077)

Is Amazon trying to build a competitive foundation model? From what I can see AWS is instead focused on hosting and re-licensing Claude, Cohere, DeepSeek and others via Bedrock. And it's pretty likely that a large chunk of this $200M will anyways go to AWS. So I'd hardly call them a loser here.

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Re:Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and XAI Granted Up to $200M fro... by corlinp on Monday July 14, 2025 @07:08PM (#44566347)

Amazon has a number of foundation models under the name Amazon Nova, which they claimed were SOTA on release but I haven't heard much at all about them since.

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Re:Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and XAI Granted Up to $200M fro... by ryoshu on Monday July 14, 2025 @07:30PM (#44566460)

They are not good...

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Re:Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and XAI Granted Up to $200M fro... by VHRanger on Tuesday July 15, 2025 @12:23AM (#44567806)

They're far from SOTA:

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/llm-benchmark.html

nova pro is worse than llama3-70B

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Re:Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and XAI Granted Up to $200M fro... by XorNot on Monday July 14, 2025 @06:39PM (#44566132)

Aka the "sell gold pans during a gold rush" strategy.

AFAIK AWS are pushing pretty hard with GovCloud these days.

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Re:Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and XAI Granted Up to $200M fro... by base698 on Monday July 14, 2025 @06:58PM (#44566286)

I think that would be power components like transformers for the grid.

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Re:Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and XAI Granted Up to $200M fro... by thfuran on Monday July 14, 2025 @07:04PM (#44566326)

Those were the people selling lumber to sawmills that eventually ended up as handles for picks.

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Re:Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and XAI Granted Up to $200M fro... by haiku2077 on Monday July 14, 2025 @06:11PM (#44565905)

Meta and Amazon both have separate DoD contracts (Meta with Anduril, Amazon through massive GovCloud contracts)

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Re:Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and XAI Granted Up to $200M fro... by prmph on Monday July 14, 2025 @06:57PM (#44566273)

What is $200M to Amazon and Meta?

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Re:Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and XAI Granted Up to $200M fro... by florbo on Monday July 14, 2025 @08:49PM (#44566843)

At the very least it's preventing funds from going to other competitors.

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Re:Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and XAI Granted Up to $200M fro... by moscoe on Monday July 14, 2025 @10:23PM (#44567286)

Meta can add 1 more member to the technical staff

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Re:Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and XAI Granted Up to $200M fro... by plasma_beam on Monday July 14, 2025 @09:00PM (#44566884)

Most of US government runs significant workloads on AWS now and that’s only increasing. They’ve cornered govt cloud infrastructure (with Azure, GCP, etc. very far behind) so not sure this matters in grand scheme of things.

Anecdotal based on industry experience, no citations.

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