This is a sales tactic, in the same way that Jetbrains and Microsoft will give out free licenses for students in the hopes that some of them will go on to work for employers who will then buy the product. It also helps convince investors about potential growth and MAU increase.
Same goes for the OpenAI and Anthropic office announcements posted by the GP, these are sales offices with very little tech employment or outsourcing happening.
Re “investments”: these are also not what you think. I remember when Amazon was partnering up with schools in the US to provide “machine learning education” where said education was thinly veiled ads for managed ML services like Sagemaker and Rekognition. I wouldn’t be surprised if the $3B investment from Microsoft was primarily free courses and certifications to cultivate a market, as well some annotation work (I know that Amazon has been hiring quite a few people to do this kind of work).
Same goes for the OpenAI and Anthropic office announcements posted by the GP, these are sales offices with very little tech employment or outsourcing happening.
Re “investments”: these are also not what you think. I remember when Amazon was partnering up with schools in the US to provide “machine learning education” where said education was thinly veiled ads for managed ML services like Sagemaker and Rekognition. I wouldn’t be surprised if the $3B investment from Microsoft was primarily free courses and certifications to cultivate a market, as well some annotation work (I know that Amazon has been hiring quite a few people to do this kind of work).