What It Takes for A.I. to Ruin Google’s Weekend
Reading Time: 2 minutesUpstarts like Anthropic are making the tech giants scramble., How Anthropic made Google scramble.
This article is from Big Technology, a newsletter by Alex Kantrowitz.
On a Saturday night in mid-September, a senior Google engineer shared some rough news with more than 50 colleagues. Part of the company’s cloud services offering was failing Anthropic, a darling A.I. startup and key strategic customer, and they’d have to work overtime to fix it.
To repair the faulty part of its service—an underperforming and unstable NVIDIA H100 cluster—Google Cloud leadership initiated a seven-day-per-week sprint for the next month. The downside of not making it work, the senior engineer said, was ‘too large, for Anthropic (most importantly), for Google Cloud, and for Google,’ according to documents I reviewed.
One week after Google initiated the sprint, Anthropic announced it had landed a new investment of up to $4 billion from Amazon and that it would make Amazon Web Services its ‘primary cloud provider for mission-critical workloads.’ The Amazon deal was in the works long before Google Cloud’s performance issues, and the two were unrelated, according to a source familiar with the matter. But Google’s sprinting engineers couldn’t have felt good seeing Anthropic ink a major deal with the competition. Especially after Google put about $300 million of funding into Anthropic late last year for 10 percent of the company.
Anthropic is one of the few independent A.I. research firms that can credibly stand alongside OpenAI and the tech giants. A handful of OpenAI expatriates founded the company out of concern their ex-employer wasn’t as open and safe as it claimed. Earlier this year, Anthropic released Claude, its answer to ChatGPT.
In addition to Claude the bot, Anthropic allows developers to build on top of its A.I. models, and the training and execution require significant capital and computing power. To that end, Anthropic has relied on the tech giants to support it, similar to how OpenAI has relied on Microsoft. But the agreements are not quite parallel. Even after its Amazon deal, Anthropic will continue to partner with Google, making itself more of a neutral player among A.I. research houses.
Still, Anthropic’s new funding deal should leave Google a bit puzzled. For Amazon, it means landing a new strategic partner that can help it advance the research status quo in A.I.—something it’s been missing despite an eagerness to serve as an infrastructural backbone for the space. For Google, the deal leads to a number of questions, especially regarding where it wants to play in A.I. As it builds its own A.I. models with Google DeepMind, will it risk losing A.I. customers in cloud? Does it want to prioritize reinventing search with A.I., or helping businesses reinvent themselves with it? Can its lower-margin divisions like the Google Cloud Platform operate with the same urgency as its higher-margin search businesses?
Google may successfully be able to do it all at once, but as it looks ahead, it will risk being outflanked by competition with less fraught tradeoffs. Google Cloud’s performance issues with Anthropic, meanwhile, seem to be settling down. But it took forcing engineers into something not often associated with life at Google: weekend work.
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