Are Amazon and Meta the ones losing out the most here, in terms of the companies building foundational models?
Probably more understandable for Meta, since they've been leaving the B2B space since Workplace has been sunset. Amazon losing out on this is pretty rough for AWS though.
Is Amazon trying to build a competitive foundation model? From what I can see AWS is instead focused on hosting and re-licensing Claude, Cohere, DeepSeek and others via Bedrock. And it's pretty likely that a large chunk of this $200M will anyways go to AWS. So I'd hardly call them a loser here.
Amazon has a number of foundation models under the name Amazon Nova, which they claimed were SOTA on release but I haven't heard much at all about them since.
Most of US government runs significant workloads on AWS now and that’s only increasing. They’ve cornered govt cloud infrastructure (with Azure, GCP, etc. very far behind) so not sure this matters in grand scheme of things.
Anecdotal based on industry experience, no citations.
Maybe it's less about the money and more about signalling to foreign adversaries. "We're prepared to weaponize AI, so you should tread lightly." Everyone knows that in case of war those millions could turn into billions overnight. It's like a cowboy flashing his gun. It says he will use it.
I know this is likely in the pipeline anyway and maybey not covered by this news but now we have the prospect of agentic llms hallucinating enemies and a digital finger on the trigger.
LLMs are only useful information systems, largely for parsing/managling variable data and building other information systems. Problem sets any large org like DoD has.
I don’t think anyone has even seriously proposed using them for weapons targeting, at least in the current broad LLM form.
If they are slow (2x as slow on a cruise missile or drone SOC) and are wrong all the time then why would they even bother? They already have AI models for visual targeting that are highly specialized for the specific job and even that’s almost entirely limited to very narrow vehicle or ship identification which is always combined with existing ballistic, radar, or GPS targeting.
Buying some LLM credits doesn’t help much at all there.
Too much of AI gets uncritically packaged with these hand wavy FUD statements IMO.
I'd like to believe you, but there's credible evidence that (e.g) DOGE has been using LLMs to cut funding for NSF or HHS using prompts in the vein of "is this grant woke."
Which is obviously stupid. So if stupid people are using these things in stupid ways, that seems bad.
Why not 20x $10M grants for smaller companies? They're gonna throw this money with no oversight anyways so why not bolster the actual startup scene instead of a bunch of incumbents who all have more than enough cash? $10M could keep a startup running for 1+ years at its most crucial time. That's 10 solutions instead of 1 -- statistically one of them will be a massive breakthrough?
Who are these smaller companies, and what do they have to offer that these 4 don't? Chances are that the smaller companies themselves are licensing the LLM from Google/Anthropic/OpenAI, so why pay middlemen for no reason?
You’re telling me that you can’t find 10 worthwhile AI startups to give money to? I bet there are 1000 on crunchbase right now. With $10M some of them could buy hardware to build their own systems.
> $10M could keep a startup running for 1+ years at its most crucial time. That's 10 solutions instead of 1 -- statistically one of them will be a massive breakthrough?
The failure rate for startups is much higher than 90%. And there’s the additional complexity of how do you pick which 20 such startups get the cash.
See my response to the other posters with the same notes
On the picking: it’s really not hard to search for AI companies and pick 20. In fact there are government programs that invest in startups so clearly it’s doable.
Who are those 20 companies? What would $10M do in the context of training LLMs that are competitive with Claude/O3/Gemini?
> That's 10 solutions instead of 1 -- statistically one of them will be a massive breakthrough?
The statistic is that 10% of startups make a massive breakthrough? Would love to see some work that comes remotely close to replicating that! Startup investing would be trivially easy.
Responded to the other poster with the same question.
Everyone says 1 out of 100 makes it big but the top 5-10% of a portfolio is still substantial. If we’re only giving the money to companies with revenue the odds of success are likely improved.
Startup investing is trivially easy. You give money to good companies and founders. There’s just a bunch of BS that gets in the way. Like giving massive money to big corps that don’t need it instead of startups that do.
As an American. I'd rather a single well established player get a large contract and actually deliver, than 20 disjointed companies each get 1/20th of the problem, have to work in concert, and possibly not even deliver at all.
This isn’t a grant to push for innovation. This is a promise from the orange man administration to the people and companies that donated to his "inauguration fund"
This is a kleptocracy but with extra steps. People are unfortunately numb to it.
It’s up to $200M for each of them. From the actual source:
“The awards to Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAI – each with a $200M ceiling – will enable the Department to leverage the technology and talent of U.S. frontier AI companies to develop agentic AI workflows across a variety of mission areas.”
It’s still not a lot. How much do tokens cost for example?
In theory if it’s just labor with some profit mixed in, then you might be looking at 600 employees for each company.
I doubt it is just labor. Quote says $200 million ceiling. So maybe a time and materials (T&M) contract? It’s a ceiling so it’s not like they earn or are guaranteed $200m.
Has to include token or cloud computing time too. Which Google owns and can amortize themselves since it’s a capital asset to them. I don’t know much about the cloud computing background of Anthropic or if they are using Azure or AWS.
I think my original point is still valid it’s not a lot when you look at it
Testing the waters. I’d guess if it pays any dividends things will ramp up. This is also across all suppliers. At some point they’ll put more wood behind fewer arrows.
Microsoft said they were beefing up their expenditure in AI with and or around the announcement of layoffs.
So does this mean all the web designers, web developers and many other white collar jobs will now be done by one such professional using AI; so XYZ use to require ten people to get the job done now only one who uses AI gets the tasks done (tasks that those ten use to use software applications to complete). All the while a few hundred of Ruoming Pangs make more money then God in which their work further helps killing white collar jobs.
Is there anyone else concerned about this? I am federal worker indirectly yet per some news today not sure how much longer I will be and whether or not it wise to go look for another web design/developer/UX Researcher (think this is safest out of three as you are talking to ppl)position. There are throngs of others looking now to compete against including now competing against AI for less jobs.
Readit News
At least that's how it was done back in the "golden years", post WW2, during which inequality was quite stable etc
Probably more understandable for Meta, since they've been leaving the B2B space since Workplace has been sunset. Amazon losing out on this is pretty rough for AWS though.
AFAIK AWS are pushing pretty hard with GovCloud these days.
Anecdotal based on industry experience, no citations.
Minority Report takes place in 2054... Phillip K Dick might have been onto something.
I don’t think anyone has even seriously proposed using them for weapons targeting, at least in the current broad LLM form.
If they are slow (2x as slow on a cruise missile or drone SOC) and are wrong all the time then why would they even bother? They already have AI models for visual targeting that are highly specialized for the specific job and even that’s almost entirely limited to very narrow vehicle or ship identification which is always combined with existing ballistic, radar, or GPS targeting.
Buying some LLM credits doesn’t help much at all there.
Too much of AI gets uncritically packaged with these hand wavy FUD statements IMO.
Which is obviously stupid. So if stupid people are using these things in stupid ways, that seems bad.
The failure rate for startups is much higher than 90%. And there’s the additional complexity of how do you pick which 20 such startups get the cash.
On the picking: it’s really not hard to search for AI companies and pick 20. In fact there are government programs that invest in startups so clearly it’s doable.
That's not how corruption works
> That's 10 solutions instead of 1 -- statistically one of them will be a massive breakthrough?
The statistic is that 10% of startups make a massive breakthrough? Would love to see some work that comes remotely close to replicating that! Startup investing would be trivially easy.
Everyone says 1 out of 100 makes it big but the top 5-10% of a portfolio is still substantial. If we’re only giving the money to companies with revenue the odds of success are likely improved.
Startup investing is trivially easy. You give money to good companies and founders. There’s just a bunch of BS that gets in the way. Like giving massive money to big corps that don’t need it instead of startups that do.
This is a kleptocracy but with extra steps. People are unfortunately numb to it.
“The awards to Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAI – each with a $200M ceiling – will enable the Department to leverage the technology and talent of U.S. frontier AI companies to develop agentic AI workflows across a variety of mission areas.”
(https://www.ai.mil/Latest/News-Press/PR-View/Article/4242822...)
In theory if it’s just labor with some profit mixed in, then you might be looking at 600 employees for each company.
I doubt it is just labor. Quote says $200 million ceiling. So maybe a time and materials (T&M) contract? It’s a ceiling so it’s not like they earn or are guaranteed $200m.
Has to include token or cloud computing time too. Which Google owns and can amortize themselves since it’s a capital asset to them. I don’t know much about the cloud computing background of Anthropic or if they are using Azure or AWS.
I think my original point is still valid it’s not a lot when you look at it
So does this mean all the web designers, web developers and many other white collar jobs will now be done by one such professional using AI; so XYZ use to require ten people to get the job done now only one who uses AI gets the tasks done (tasks that those ten use to use software applications to complete). All the while a few hundred of Ruoming Pangs make more money then God in which their work further helps killing white collar jobs.
Is there anyone else concerned about this? I am federal worker indirectly yet per some news today not sure how much longer I will be and whether or not it wise to go look for another web design/developer/UX Researcher (think this is safest out of three as you are talking to ppl)position. There are throngs of others looking now to compete against including now competing against AI for less jobs.