E-commerce giant Amazon said it will invest up to US $ 4 billion in artificial intelligence firm Anthropic and take a minority ownership position in the company.
The move underscores Amazon’s aggressive AI push as it looks to keep pace with rivals such as Microsoft and Alphabet’s Google. Anthropic was founded roughly two years ago by former OpenAI research executives and recently debuted its new AI chatbot called Claude 2.
Amazon is looking to capitalise on the hype and promise of so-called generative AI, which includes technology like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, as well as Anthropic’s Claude chatbots.
To an extent, Amazon’s deal with Anthropic aims to show that there are alternative chips that can be used for AI applications.
AWS customers will be able to build on Anthropic’s AI models via Amazon Bedrock — a service that lets customers build generative AI applications in the cloud via existing models, rather than train their own models.
Amazon is looking to position itself as the one-stop shop for AI. The e-commerce giant designs its own chips for training huge AI models. Through Amazon Bedrock, customers can also design their own generative AI applications using existing models, which are all run on the Amazon cloud. The company sells its own AI applications too.
Anthropic already counts some high-profile backers, including Google and Salesforce Ventures. This support comes as tech giants continue to make massive bets on AI companies, a move sparked by Microsoft’s multi-billion dollar investment in ChatGPT maker OpenAI in January.
