"The AI Arms Race Heats Up: Amazon Partners with Anthropic" on the Pure AI Web Site

I contributed some technical comments to an article titled “The AI Arms Race Heats Up: Amazon Partners with Anthropic” in the October 2023 edition of the Pure AI web site. See https://pureai.com/articles/2023/09/28/ai-arms-race.aspx.

The article mentions the recent $4 billion Amazon partnership with the Anthropic startup company. And then the article describes five significant large language model efforts:

1.) Microsoft and OpenAI with their GPT-x LLM and the ChatGPT application.
2.) Amazon and Anthropic with their Claude LLM/application.
3.) Facebook with their LLaMA LLM/application.
4.) Google with their Gemini LLM/application.
5.) xAI, a new startup funded by Elon Musk.

I’m quoted: “The underlying neural technology of an LLM, while not simple, requires only a relatively small team of engineers,” he said. “But housing an LLM requires a huge amount of compute resources, which meant that Anthropic would have to either get billions of dollars in funding, or more likely, partner with a large tech company. Amazon was the obvious choice.”

And, McCaffrey observed, “Business opportunities are likely to arise where entrepreneurs devise some clever way to use the LLMs developed and maintained by large companies.”

The term “arms race” refers to weapons, not the body parts. There are a surprising number of movies that feature severed arms and hands.

Left: In “The Crawling Hand” (1963), an astronaut crash lands and dies but his severed arm is possesed by an evil alien presence. This is a classic movie that’s so bad, it’s weirdly entertaining.

Center: “Dr. Terrors House of Horrors” (1965) is an anthology movie with five short stories. One of them is about an arrogant art critic, played by iconic actor Christopher Lee (1922-2015), who indirectly causes an artist to lose his hand and commit suicide. The hand gets revenge. This is actually a pretty good movie.

Right: In “The Beast with Five Fingers” (1946), a murder occurs in a creepy old mansion and the corpse is missing a hand. It turns out the insane murderer (actor Peter Lorre) is just imagining that the severed hand is crawling around. This movie is well-regarded by most reviewers and critics, but I think it’s only so-so.