Amazon to invest up to $4 billion in AI company Anthropic
Amazon will invest up to $4 billion (€3.76 billion) in Anthropic, taking a minority stake in the artificial intelligence (AI) company, the e-commerce giant announced on Monday.
Anthropic is the US company behind the AI assistant Claude, a large language model that rivals OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Amazon’s stake in Anthropic is another sign of the increasing global race to develop new AI tools, with many technology giants expanding their investments.
As part of the closer collaboration between the companies, Anthropic will use Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its main cloud provider for developing AI technologies and safety research.
It will also use AWS chips to build, train and deploy its AI models and provide Amazon customers with early access to them.
Amazon will first invest $1.25 billion (€1.18 billion) with the possibility of increasing the investment to $4 billion, according to Reuters.
“We have tremendous respect for Anthropic’s team and foundation models, and believe we can help improve many customer experiences, short and long-term, through our deeper collaboration,” said Andy Jassy, Amazon CEO, in a statement.
Anthropic said in a post on social media: «Training state-of-the-art models requires extensive resources including compute power and research programs, and Amazon’s supply of compute infrastructure alongside other providers will ensure we’re equipped to continue advancing the frontier of AI safety and research».
Anthropic’s founders were previously executives at OpenAI. They have also received investment money from Google to build generative AI tools.
Amazon previewed a future look for its virtual assistant Alexa last week, stating that it will eventually be powered by generative AI to make it more conversational.