Comment by cavisne
11 hours ago
Does not seem that complicated. OpenAI basically had to do a lock-in deal with Microsoft/Azure at the time, and they pioneered this circular funding hyperscaler deal structure so there were some rough edges.
Anthropic (all ex Open AI) knew the negatives of the deal, so they made a slightly better deal with AWS, not a full lock in. They also grounded it in hardware from the start, ie. being the flagship customer for Trainium, the flagship customer for external usage of TPU's.
Also, the fact that other tech leaders know very well how Sam Altman operates doesn’t help OpenAI secure deals with big tech.
Domain knowledge, expertise, is a big thing in tech, because code can be written fast if you know what to do, and so by having that expertise, building a frontier model is a matter of time and capex. Anthropic is founded by top ex-openAi, so they are not lacking in expertise, and are not attached to SamAlt. It’s an easy choice of who to finance.
Anthropic will win long term because big tech knows how much of a loud mouth sam is, how much of the piee he wants, he is more of a rival then some company they could use to grow. While Anthropic (even though they aren’t really good guys) seems more like a shared common good for the big tech then openAi, like linux corporate business deals version.
This seems like wild speculation that isn't even really true at all. OpenAI locked up all the compute capacity which is why Anthropic is struggling so badly with capacity to scale for demand. It's why Claude quality is plummeting and people are leaving in droves because the usage limits are pathetic and the API pricing structure is outrageous. All because they can't scale. So that's what this deal is about.