Tim Cook in China for Third Time This Year, Trump Threatens 10% China Tariffs, Amazon Invests Another $4B in Anthropic
We kick off today’s update with my thoughts on Tim Cook’s third visit to China in 2024 and what appears to be political maneuvering and massaging tied to President Trump winning a second term. The discussion then turns to Trump threatening a 10% tariff put on Chinese goods. We conclude the update with Amazon putting more money in Anthropic.
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Amazon Alexa to Be Powered by Claude, Charging for AI, Apple Rumored to Invest in OpenAI
Happy Tuesday. Welcome to September.
One very quick follow-up to last Thursday’s discussion involving Apple Watch. We talked about my wish for Google to be more original with smartwatches. It’s easy to be different. A much harder goal is to be better.
Today’s update will have an AI theme as we begin with Amazon, move over to AI monetization, and then conclude with Apple / OpenAI. Let’s jump in.
Amazon Alexa to Be Powered by Claude
Here’s Reuters:
“Amazon's revamped Alexa due for release in October ahead of the U.S. holiday season will be powered primarily by Anthropic's Claude artificial intelligence models, rather than its own AI, five people familiar with the matter told Reuters.
Amazon plans to charge $5 to $10 a month for its new ‘Remarkable’ version of Alexa as it will use powerful generative AI to answer complex queries, while still offering the ‘Classic’ voice assistant for free, Reuters reported in June.
But initial versions of the new Alexa using in-house software simply struggled for words, sometimes taking six or seven seconds to acknowledge a prompt and reply, one of the people said.
That's why Amazon turned to Claude, an AI chatbot developed by startup Anthropic, as it performed better than the online retail giant's own AI models, the people said.”
Last October, Amazon announced a $4B investment in Anthropic (owns Claude). The news was positioned by Amazon as a “strategic collaboration to advance generative AI.” Anthropic said it would use AWS as its primary cloud provider, which means a portion of that $4B will find its way back to Amazon, while making future foundation models accessible to AWS customers with some features coming to AWS first. It’s not clear if this rumored Alexa/Claude integration was in the works last year and was tied with Amazon’s $4B investment.
As for motives, Amazon is becoming nervous of missing the boat on whatever remaining generative AI buzz and mania is left to squeeze. A year ago, Amazon held a product event where it gave its take on generative AI. As we discussed at the time,
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An audio version of the newsletter is available to members who have the podcast add-on attached to their membership. More information about the podcast add-on is found here. Special Inside Orchard bundle pricing is available for Above Avalon members. Additional membership customization is available via the Financial Models add-ons.