alt Hacker NewsIs anyone keeping track of all these “partnerships” and “investments” in one place? This is all turning into a ton of what looks like PR fodder that appears to go nowhere.
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Like Stargate? We’re investing $0.5T! Well, over 4 years, but $100B now for sure. Well, maybe just $50B and we will borrow the rest, probably. Well… not today. it’s more of a “commitment” than an investment. OK, OK, we haven’t actually raised any money for this.
This doesn't seem to be investment focussed activity, but rather extending Claude credits for education and research. Which is a good thing, independent of other bad things that might be happening.
I make sure I frequently talk about running a marathon someday, just so all my friends think I'm in better shape than I am.
Compared to the insanely circular deals that OpenAI made? I have slight more confidence in Anthropics partnerships honestly. This is the Gates foundation dropping 200 million for use of Claude for medical research, unlike OpenaAIs weird "we will buy stuff off you in the future" but I don't know that they actually ever have or did.
Have you worked in a big company before? I swear they were announcing random partnerships and MoUs every week. They never went anywhere except fancy dinners for the executives involved. Sometimes they were literally announcing partnerships with essentially competitors, because apparently executives on both sides were too stupid to understand their own business.
The worst were the ones where long after all the cocktails were drunk, some executive (too stupid to understand the vapid nature of these partnerships) got it into his mind to "check up on the progress of the cooperation". That mess predictably rolled downhill because nobody was willing to tell them the truth.
A lot of the recent news just makes me think much worse of Anthropic.
If you're going to partner with a charitable Gates, choose the good one (though to be fair, she's probably going to be far more discerning).
And Anthropic's decision to become complicit in poisoning Memphis with Grok's methane turbines already put the lie to the idea they are the conscientious ones when it comes to large AI companies.
Ed Zitron[1] has a lot of articles and podcast episodes on these deals. The nice thing about it is that he occasionally revisits the old announcements to check what happened with them. Apparently a lot of these deals just evaporate after prolonged contact with reality.
[1] https://www.wheresyoured.at/