In an effort to compete with burgeoning cloud rivals on artificial intelligence, Amazon.com announced on Monday that it will spend up to $4 billion in cash in the well-known firm Anthropic.
As part of the agreement, Anthropics technology will get early access to Amazon’s workers and cloud customers, allowing them to integrate it into their organisations. The San Francisco-based business also vowed to heavily rely on Amazon’s cloud services, including training its upcoming AI models on a sizable number of custom chips it would purchase from the online retail and computing behemoth.
The CEOs of Amazon’s cloud division and Anthropic announced in a joint interview that there will be an immediate investment of $1.25 billion, with either partner having the power to prompt a further $2.75 billion in funding from Amazon.
They chose not to disclose the startup’s increased valuation, which was previously estimated at more than $4 billion, or how much of Anthropic Amazon would now hold. Amazon said that its interest was a minority one and that it would not be given a board seat.
The information may be Amazon’s largest response to far to smaller cloud rivals Microsoft and Alphabet’s Google, which have sold or created potent AI this year. The agreement demonstrates the cloud firms’ continuous efforts to forge partnerships with the AI startups that are transforming their sector.
Since 2019, Microsoft has invested billions of dollars in its collaboration with OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT, offering its clients exclusive access to the prose-writing and image-generating technologies of the start-up.
In the meantime, Google supported the development of this area of AI and contributed to Anthropic’s $450 million financing in May, according to the startup.
The arrangement struck on Monday may result in a rise in demand for Amazon’s products, particularly chips supporting AI. Anthropic agreed to work on creating technologies, for example, for Amazon’s own Trainium and Inferential chips.
AWS CEO Adam Selipsky stated that the agreement “will help make Anthropic’s models better, as well as our chip technology and AI infrastructure better.”
The chief executive officer of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, claimed that his organisation “has obtained the money in a way that allows it to prioritise safety” and “allows us to continue to scale up our models.”
Anthropic is one of a number of businesses developing so-called generative AI, or systems that can create material as though a person created it. Anthropic was started by former OpenAI executives, including Amodei. Anthropic has tried to set itself apart by teaching AI to uphold moral principles.
Amodei declined to comment on how competitive its most recent funding was.
According to him, Anthropic is sticking with the deal it announced with Google in February. Anthropic had planned to make their technology available through Google Cloud and other channels while employing Google’s special processors.
However, with the arrangement announced on Monday, Anthropic is supporting Amazon Bedrock, a platform that has drawn thousands of customers to begin developing AI applications.
Customers of Amazon will get early access to Anthropic features like the opportunity to modify their AI. According to Selipsky, “both companies are committing that future versions of Claude will be available on Amazon Bedrock for many years to come, and that’s important.”
The Claude 2 AI model from Anthropic is designed to assess lengthy business or legal texts since it can respond to unusually large prompts.
The agreement, according to Amodei, “allows us to work more closely to drive enterprise usage for Claude,” which he claimed represented the majority of Bedrock’s up until this point.
According to Amodei, the data analytics business LexisNexis is collaborating with Anthropic and Amazon to improve the “intelligence” of its own legal search functions. He listed Lonely Planet and Bridgewater Associates as more clients.
Anthropic has not yet achieved the name recognition or usage of OpenAI, the startup that created ChatGPT, one of the world’s fastest-growing software apps, and the creator of the GPT-4 model.
To minimise the need for consumers to search elsewhere for cloud services, Amazon has worked to provide a wide variety of AI models.
When asked whether Amazon might invest in other AI firms in addition to Anthropic, Selipsky replied, “I honestly don’t know what the future will hold.”
