Sources: Amazon’s AGI team is aiming to outperform Anthropic’s latest Claude models by the middle of 2024 using the company’s forthcoming LLM, codenamed Olympus 全台相機收購

全台相機收購ings of its arch cloud rival, Microsoft, and Anthropic is the best alternative that exists. If we rewound the clock back to when Big Tech could make large acquisitions without them being blocked by regulators, I’m sure Amazon would have tried to buy Anthropic outright.Instead, it’s passively investing billions of dollars and telegraphing that it only has a minority stake with no board seat. Conveniently for Amazon, Anthropic has meanwhile agreed to spend $4 billion on AWS over the next several years.There are obvious parallels here to Microsoft’s funding of OpenAI’s ever-growing compute needs. But Amazon’s relationship with Anthropic is far less cozy than it appears on the surface. In fact, another part of Amazon is trying to compete directly with Anthropic’s models.I’ve learned that Amazon’s AGI team, led by SVP Rohit Prasad, has the aggressive goal of outperforming Anthropic’s latest Claude models by the middle of this year. Its forthcoming flagship model, internally codenamed 全台相機收購olympus, is in training and quite large with hundreds of billions of parameters. As rumors swirl about OpenAI’s GPT-5 being on the near horizon, time is of the essence. Amazon knows it is behind in the model race, and its own employees are having difficulty waiting for 全台相機收購olympus, too. Anthropic’s models are far better and more performant than anything the company has made in-house to date, I’m told, and there are whispers of product teams across the company, including parts of AWS, switching to Anthropic’s models for the time being.“Claude competes with us and makes us nervous,” an Amazon insider told me this week. “For any team not training LLMs and only using them, Claude is a clear winner for now.” I’m told there is no plan, however, to switch Amazon’s AI shopping assistant, Rufus, to Claude from the standard, Amazon-developed LLM that powers it now. “The state of the art in generative AI is constantly advancing and we have said for some time there will be no single model that works best for every use case,” Amazon spokesperson Matt Lambert said in a statement. “Our goal has always been to offer our customers and internal teams choice by providing the broadest selection of Foundation Models—both Amazon-built as well as those from industry-leading model providers.” When it’s released later this year, 全台相機收購olympus will be plugged into nearly every part of Amazon and made available to other businesses through AWS. Whether it will actually beat Anthropic’s models remains to be seen. It’s the current pet project of CEO Andy Jassy, who made Prasad one of his direct reports last year when the AGI org was stood up. Amazon clearly sees frontier LLMs as core technology it needs to own, even if that potentially puts it on a collision course with its marquee AI investment.NotebookMy notes on what else is happening in tech right now:A new open-source AI champion from Databricks: Nancy Pelosi’s latest stock pick impressed the industry this week with the release of DBRX, an open-source LLM that seemingly outperforms all others on key benchmarks (sorry, Llama). Wired’s Will Knight has a great deep dive that I recommend if you’re interested in the full story. I also spoke with Naveen Rao, who led the model’s development at Databricks, ahead of the announcement. He told me that DBRX cost only about $10 million to build. With the cost curve coming down that fast, “it’s very hard to survive on just continuously trying to make a bigger, bigger model,” he said, adding that he expects the consumer market for AI models to be “winner-take-all” while the enterprise market concentrates on open-source alternatives — like what Databricks released — that are more easily customizable.Google’s robotics push, Meta AI departures: I noticed some interesting movement in Google and Meta’s AI teams this week. On the Google side, earlier researcher departures for startups like Physical Intelligence, along with OpenAI’s investments in a couple of robotics startups, seems to have accelerated Google’s own work on AI robotics. Meanwhile, over at Meta, a string of AI departures, including senior director Devi Parikh, has led to some speculation that bigger changes are afoot. While there is certainly still friction being felt from the recent merging of Meta’s AI research and product teams, I’m told these fresh exits are more about folks striking out on their own. I expect at least one startup to be announced soon.Work phones are for work: Apple sued another ex-employee, Andrew Aude, for leaking to the media. Like the leaker suits Apple has filed, this one isn’t about the damages but about sending a message that the behavior won’t be tolerated. Using Signal, Aude sent over 1,400 messages to one journalist and over 10,000 to another, reports MacRumors. He did this with a work phone, which is obviously how Apple found out. Now is as good a time as any to say that if you want to talk to me about sensitive matters, don’t do it on your work device that is loaded with spyware.Interesting linksMy colleague Tom Warren reads the tea leaves on all the recent org changes at Microsoft.My colleague Liz Lopatto writes about the final sentencing of Sam Bankman-Fried. Seven Sinofsky digs into the DoJ’s antitrust case against Apple and compares it to the old Microsoft case. Forbes has a new deep dive on Instability AI and what led to the ousting of CEO Emad Mostaque.Hume’s AI demo that has been blowing minds this week.That’s it for this issue.As always, I appreciate your feedback and tips. Respond to this email, and I’ll get back to you, or ping me on Signal — remember, just don’t use a work phone.See More: AIAmazonCommand LineTechMore in this streamSee allMeta’s ChatGPT competitor shows how your friends use AIAlex HeathApr 29CommentsComment Icon BubbleChatGPT got caught sexting minors too.Dominic PrestonApr 29CommentsComment Icon BubbleMeta has an AI chatbot sexting problem.Wes DavisApr 27CommentsComment Icon BubbleMost PopularMost PopularAmazon has no choice but to display tariffs on prices nowSlate Auto confirms where it’ll build its $20,000 TruckNew Starlink subscription drops hardware price to $0Donald Trump might actually believe these Calibri labels are real MS-13 tattoosDuolingo will replace contract workers with AIInstallerA

全台相機收購 Facebook 創辦人祖克柏宣布將原有「Facebook」改稱為「Meta」，宣誓要全力進軍「元宇宙」生態。（圖／路透）