Amazon will direct investments of up to $4 billion to the company Anthropic, which operates in the sphere of artificial intelligence.
The e-commerce giant’s decision is part of its efforts to become a major player in the generative machine intelligence industry. Also, by providing investment funds, Amazon in a certain sense offers a vote of confidence to a popular startup developing AI technologies.
The e-commerce giant will conclude a deal with Anthropic. As part of the partnership program, the startup will transfer most of its software to Amazon Web Services data centers. Also, Anthropic will use the computing company’s homegrown chips to train AI models that are applied as part of the functioning of chatbots and other apps. The startup intends to direct financial injections to pay for the huge costs associated with the processes of training and launching mass configurations of artificial intelligence.
Amazon will have a minority position in Anthropic. The relevant information is contained in the joint statement of the companies, which was published on Monday, September 25.
The e-commerce and cloud computing giant has long demonstrated interest in partnerships in those industries that are a priority in terms of its development and scaling prospects, including cargo transportation in sphere aviation, production of electric cars, and food distribution.
Experts say that if the volume of investment injections into Anthropic in the amount of about $4 billion, this will be the largest corporate transaction that is directly related to AWS. This unit of Amazon creates its own products as part of the traditional strategy of activity and does not rely on third-party technologies or businesses. AWS makes relatively modest acquisitions in the market, which is a rapidly developing space amid the hype around new-generation technologies and billions of financial investments.
Amazon said that its engineers, including those who do not work in the mentioned unit, will have access to artificial intelligence models developed by Anthropic.
AWS is currently the world’s largest seller of computing power and on-demand storage systems. Many are skeptical about this functional unit, stating its technical backwardness in the area of computer models that can generate text materials, images, and other content. According to experts, AWS lacked a popular digital product and a high-end exclusive partner in the industry.
Interaction in the sphere of AI is essential. For example, OpenAI, which has developed the world’s most popular chatbot based on machine intelligence ChatGPT, runs its software in data centers owned by Microsoft. The tech giant has invested $13 billion in this company.
Amazon executives say that generative artificial intelligence is currently in its infancy. Also, according to them, as of today, more than 100 thousand customers of the e-commerce giant have used machine learning tools developed by the company.
The basic model of the Anthropic, which was named Claude, was already available as part of an Amazon service called Bedrock. Currently, this configuration of machine intelligence is still at an early stage of development.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said that, in his opinion, as a result of cooperation with the AI startup, the quality of customer service will be improved in the short and long term.
Also, this transaction is of particular importance for the company, which is part of the Amazon ownership structure, for the production of chips, which includes Trainium and Inferentia processors used in machine intelligence apps. Currently, most advanced AI configurations are based on expensive microcircuits created by Nvidia. Anthropic will use AWS chips to develop and train future basic models of digital intelligence.
The AI startup, which will receive financial investments from Amazon, was founded by OpenAI veterans. To date, the company has raised investments of more than $1 billion to create a more secure chatbot that solves tasks such as summarizing, searching, coding, and answering user requests. The startup received $400 million in funding from Google.
Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, says that partnerships will allow the company to open up new opportunities for organizations of any size, as the brand implements modern and secure AI systems together with advanced AWS cloud technologies.
As we have reported earlier, Anthropic Introduces Paid Plan for Its AI Assistant.
