adplus-dvertising
Connect with us

Investment

WeCrashed offers a bad return on investment – The A.V. Club

Published

 on


Anne Hathaway and Jared Leto in WeCrashed
Photo: Apple TV+

As far as not-so-great ideas go, WeCrashed isn’t quite as misguided as the multi-billion dollar mayhem it recaps. But boy howdy if it doesn’t match former WeWork CEO Adam Neumann pound-for-pound on crappy decision-making, hapless showmanship, and missed opportunities to get back to basics.

Streaming its first three episodes on March 18 (the rest will come weekly after that), the eight-episode limited series from Apple TV+ is the most recent telling of Neumann’s meteoric rise and cataclysmic decline at WeWork.

The nebulously defined real estate company, which Neumann championed as both an innovative co-working startup and revolutionary effort to “change the world,” famously went from a $47 billion valuation to threat of bankruptcy in just six weeks during the summer of 2019.

300x250x1

Search “WeWork CEO” online and–once you’ve scrolled past its new, less quirky leadership–you’ll find countless articles rehashing the zany entrepreneur’s explosive time manifesting and then mangling a so-called unicorn company. (For those new to venture capitalist lingo: A financial “unicorn” is any privately held startup valued at at least $1 billion.)

Assuming audiences actually want a dramatization of the WeWork saga–which, speaking generously here, is iffy–there are plenty of splashy stories from Neumann’s downfall to put on screen. There’s that time he reportedly hot boxed a private jet, then forgot to deplane his drugs; those rumors that he claimed to have plans for becoming “president of the world” and taking WeWork to Mars; that viral photo of him walking frantic–and barefoot–in New York City mere hours before losing his role as CEO; not to mention, the countless presentations, press briefings, batshit ragers, and resultant lawsuits that saw the hard-partying Israeli businessman snag headlines years before his notorious unseating.

With all that inspiration to draw from, it’s a bit of a marvel then that WeCrashed creators Lee Eisenberg and Drew Crevello don’t deliver a more entertaining show. Despite its impressively detailed set and what looks like a spare-no-expense production design, Apple TV+’s slick recreation isn’t a fraction as fun as seeing the real thing in the Hulu documentary WeWork: Or The Making And Breaking Of A $47 Billion Unicorn, and it isn’t nearly as insightful as the 2020 Wondery podcast on which WeCrashed is loosely based. (For what it’s worth, Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell’s The Cult Of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, And The Great Startup Delusion remains the most informative WeWork explainer on the market–and, depending on your reading speed, is only marginally longer than the super-stretched TV series.)

Jared Leto and Kyle Marvin in 'WeCrashed'
Jared Leto as Adam Neumann and Kyle Marvin as Miguel McKelvey in WeCrashed
Photo: Apple TV+

WeCrashed places extra emphasis on the relationship between Neumann and his equally unusual wife and former WeWork executive Rebekah (whose maiden name is Paltrow, and, yes, is cousins with that Paltrow), which helps differentiate it from solo Silicon Valley character studies The Dropout and Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber.

But stars Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway, who deftly play the Neumanns as hyper-passionate yuppies with little to no understanding of consequence, can’t act their way into a story that just isn’t clicking. The primary problem with WeCrashed is its stunning reluctance to say much of anything with its source material—be it about millennials’ crumbling vision of hustle culture, the practical limits on delusions of grandeur, or even the demands of being in a high-profile, scandal-ridden marriage.

The poorly constructed narrative instead presents a muddy, nonlinear collection of events that sometimes creates clever connections between the Neumanns’ beginnings and WeWork’s undoing–but more often appears as a cliché and confused waste of actors better than the erratic editing and direction that frames their performances. (Seriously, very few series can justify having this many goofy smash cuts–and WeCrashed isn’t one of them.)

Anne Hathaway and Jared Leto in 'WeCrashed'
Anne Hathaway and Jared Leto as Rebekah and Adam Neumann in WeCrashed
Photo: Apple TV+

Those sorts of cringe-worthy miscalculations punctuate a show that’s otherwise so stale it might as well have already come out. Endless arguments in WeWork boardrooms and at WeWork construction sites between Adam, Rebekah, and co-founder Miguel McKelvey (Kyle Marvin) are broken up by almost as many party montages–bringing to mind dozens of similar TV shows and movies about wealthy disruptors that are by and large better than this one.

The fights aren’t as smart as the ones in something like the extraordinarily well-written The Social Network, and the parties aren’t as wild as the ones portrayed in something like the bonkers The Wolf Of Wall Street. So the half-baked sameness of the party-fight-party-fight cycle simply washes over the screen, overwhelming the show’s more original ideas with a deluge of exhausting knockoffs that range from boring and forgettable to contrived and overwritten.

The cast of 'WeCrashed'
A scene from WeCrashed
Photo: Apple TV+

Select scenes breakthrough the derivative disappointment and most of those center on Hathaway. Rebekah’s peak villain moments are genuinely enjoyable, in part because they allow Hathaway to revisit the dynamic of her beloved Devil Wears Prada performance from Meryl Streep’s character’s POV. (Look out for a monologue between Rebekah and an assistant in episode six that’s all but copied from the Miranda Priestly playbook.)

Plus, when Hathaway is placed opposite America Ferrera, whose role as the fictional Alishia Kennedy appears to be modeled after the real-world nightmare of SoulCycle’s Julie Rice, the actors light up with refreshingly believable tension. (It’s worth noting that this and other storylines from WeCrashed depart considerably from the facts reported.)

Anne Hathaway as Rebekah Neumann
Anne Hathaway as Rebekah Neumann in WeCrashed
Photo: Apple TV+

Leto doesn’t fare as well with his outrageous CEO, though that seems to stem mainly from lackluster direction. Not only is the actor’s performance hampered by a remarkably distracting nose prosthetic, but his take on the character is so intensely energetic throughout that it borders on one-note.

Scene after scene, Leto bombasts with his big accent and even bigger hand gestures. It’s how the real Adam Neumann behaves, yes, but it’s difficult to watch let alone find compelling. Even in quieter beats, like when the subtle dimension of frenetic genius flits across Adam’s eyes mid-sell (no one said Leto can’t act!), the fatigue of it all may still leave you thinking, “This guy again?”

It’s a question that could apply to the series as a whole. At its best, this painfully uninspired WeWork redux is a redundant, montage-heavy account of facts told more completely elsewhere. At its worst, WeCrashed is a clumsy, ill-advised memorialization of selfish behavior, inexplicably propping up Adam and Rebekah Neumann for yet another dose of outsized attention.

Adblock test (Why?)

728x90x4

Source link

Continue Reading

Investment

Amazon completes $4B Anthropic investment to advance generative AI – About Amazon

Published

 on

By


Amazon concludes $4 billion investment in Anthropic.

Customers of all sizes and industries are using Claude on Amazon Bedrock to reimagine user experiences, reinvent their businesses, and accelerate their generative AI journeys.

300x250x1

The work Amazon and Anthropic are doing together to bring the most advanced generative artificial intelligence (generative AI) technologies to customers worldwide is only beginning. As part of a strategic collaborative agreement, we and Anthropic announced that Anthropic is using Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its primary cloud provider for mission critical workloads, including safety research and future foundation model development. Anthropic will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to build, train, and deploy its future models and has made a long-term commitment to provide AWS customers around the world with access to future generations of its foundation models on Amazon Bedrock, AWS’s fully managed service that provides secure, easy access to the industry’s widest choice of high-performing, fully managed foundation models (FMs), along with the most compelling set of features (including best-in-class retrieval augmented generation, guardrails, model evaluation, and AI-powered agents) that help customers build highly-capable, cost-effective, low latency generative AI applications.

Earlier this month, we announced access to the most powerful Anthropic AI models on Amazon Bedrock. The Claude 3 family of models demonstrate advanced intelligence, near-human levels of responsiveness, improved steerability and accuracy, and new vision capabilities. Industry benchmarks show that Claude 3 Opus, the most intelligent of the model family, has set a new standard, outperforming other models available today—including OpenAI’s GPT-4—in the areas of reasoning, math, and coding.

“We have a notable history with Anthropic, together helping organizations of all sizes around the world to deploy advanced generative artificial intelligence applications across their organizations,” said Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of Data and AI at AWS. “Anthropic’s visionary work with generative AI, most recently the introduction of its state-of-the art Claude 3 family of models, combined with Amazon’s best-in-class infrastructure like AWS Tranium and managed services like Amazon Bedrock further unlocks exciting opportunities for customers to quickly, securely, and responsibly innovate with generative AI. Generative AI is poised to be the most transformational technology of our time, and we believe our strategic collaboration with Anthropic will further improve our customers’ experiences, and look forward to what’s next.”

Global organizations of all sizes, across virtually every industry, are already using Amazon Bedrock to build their generative AI applications with Anthropic’s Claude AI. They include ADP, Amdocs, Bridgewater Associates, Broadridge, CelcomDigi, Clariant, Cloudera, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Degas Ltd., Delta Air Lines, Druva, Enverus, Genesys, Genomics England, GoDaddy, Happy Fox, Intuit, KT, LivTech, Lonely Planet, LexisNexis Legal & Professional, M1 Finance, Netsmart, Nexxiot, Parsyl, Perplexity AI, Pfizer, the PGA TOUR, Proto Hologram, Ricoh USA, Rocket Companies, and Siemens.

To further help speed the adoption of advanced generative AI technologies, AWS, Anthropic, and Accenture recently announced that they are coming together to help organizations—especially those in highly-regulated industries including healthcare, public sector, banking, and insurance—responsibly adopt and scale generative AI solutions. Through this collaboration, organizations will gain access to best-in-class models from Anthropic, a broad set of capabilities only available on Amazon Bedrock, and industry expertise from Accenture, Anthropic, and AWS to help them build and scale generative AI applications that are customized for their specific use cases.

Deepening our commitment to advancing generative AI, today we have an update on the announcement we made to invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic for a minority ownership position in the company. Last September, we made an initial investment of $1.25 billion. Today, we made our additional $2.75 billion investment, bringing our total investment in Anthropic to $4 billion. To learn more about the broader strategic collaboration between Amazon and Anthropic, of which this investment is one part, check out the stories below:

Adblock test (Why?)

728x90x4

Source link

Continue Reading

Investment

Amazon doubles down on Anthropic, completing its planned $4B investment – TechCrunch

Published

 on

By


Amazon invested a further $2.75 billion in growing AI power Anthropic on Wednesday, following through on the option it left open last September. The $1.25 billion it invested at the time must be producing results, or perhaps they’ve realized that there are no other horses available to back.

The September deal put $1.25 billion into the company in exchange for a minority stake, and certain tit-for-tat agreements like Anthropic continuing to use AWS for its extensive computation needs.

Amazon reportedly had until the end of the first quarter to decide whether to increase its investment to a maximum of $4 billion, and here we are just before the deadline, and the company has decided to throw in the maximum amount.

300x250x1

Anthropic’s AI models are one of very few that compete at the highest levels of capability (however you define it) yet are available at scale for enterprises to deploy internally or in user-facing applications. OpenAI’s GPT series and Google’s Gemini are the others up there, but upstarts like Mistral may soon threaten that fragile triumvirate.

Lacking the capability to develop adequate models on their own for whatever reason, companies like Amazon and Microsoft have had to act vicariously through others, primarily OpenAI and Anthropic. The two have reaped immense benefits by allying with one or the other of these moneyed rivals, and as yet have not seen many downsides.

What we can take from Amazon’s decision to invest the maximum after (one must assume) getting a pretty close look at how they make the AI sausage over there is, really, pretty scant.

It makes too much strategic sense for these companies, which possess enormous war chests saved up for exactly this purpose (outspending rivals when they can’t out-innovate them), to pour cash into the AI sector. Right now the AI world is a bit like a roulette table, with OpenAI and Anthropic representing black and red. No one really knows where the ball will land, least of all the companies that couldn’t predict or create this technology themselves. But if your bitter enemy puts their chips down on red, it only makes sense for you to bet on black.

Especially if you can bet on black at a discount — which is what Amazon got here, since it could invest at Anthropic’s September valuation, which is most certainly lower than it is today.

That said, if things were looking sketchy over there — the way they must have looked at Inflection before Microsoft pounced on it — Amazon could have backed out or just invested less than the full supplemental $2.75 billion. But that might have sent a confusing signal no one wants getting out there, least of all existing multibillion-dollar investors.

We know Anthropic has a plan, and this year we’ll find out what Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and other multinational interests think they can do to monetize this supposedly revolutionary technology.

Adblock test (Why?)

728x90x4

Source link

Continue Reading

Investment

Canada to tighten foreign investment rules for AI, other sectors

Published

 on

Canada will require foreign companies to warn the government in advance before making investments or acquisitions in artificial intelligence, quantum computing and space technology, Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday, citing an interview with Innovation Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne.

The move will aid the government in conducting a national-security review before transactions get too far advanced and would-be investors may be restricted in their access to target companies’ user data or other property while the inquiry is taking place, the report said.


Click to play video: 'Canadians concerned about risk of AI generated fraud'
4:47
Canadians concerned about risk of AI generated fraud

300x250x1

 


The tougher rules will also apply to investments in critical minerals and potentially other sectors, Champagne said to Bloomberg.

Earlier this month, Champagne said Canada will crack down on foreign investment in the interactive digital media sector to stop state-sponsored actors from endangering national security.

Adblock test (Why?)

728x90x4

Source link

Continue Reading

Trending