In a strategic move to solidify its footprint in the rapidly evolving field of artificial intelligence (AI), Amazon has revealed plans to invest a staggering $4 billion in Anthropic, a promising AI startup known for its groundbreaking advancements in AI research and development.
About Anthropic
Anthropic was founded roughly two years ago by former OpenAI research executives and has gained prominence for its work in creating AI systems that have a deep understanding of the world and exhibit human-like cognitive abilities. Anthropic has now raised $2.7 billion from investors, including Spark Capital, Salesforce, Sound Ventures, Menlo Ventures, and Zoom.
Just last month, the AI startup launched its first consumer-facing premium subscription plan for chatbot Claude 2, plans to build a “frontier model” – tentatively called “Claude-“Next”- that is 10 times more capable than today’s most powerful AI, according to an investor deck TechCrunch obtained earlier this year.
Amazon: Anthropic Partnership
As part of the agreement with Amazon, Anthropic will use AWS as a primary cloud provider for mission-critical workloads, including safety research and future foundation model development. At the same time, Anthropic will also develop, train, and deploy its upcoming foundation models using AWS Trainium and Inferential chips.
In a press release, Andy Jassy, Amazon’s chief executive, said that the partnership hopes to significantly enhance Amazon client experiences.
“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. Customers are quite excited about Amazon Bedrock, AWS’s new managed service that enables companies to use various foundation models to build generative AI applications on top of, as well as AWS Trainium, AWS’s AI training chip, and our collaboration with Anthropic should help customers get even more value from these two capabilities.”
Meanwhile, the duo firms added that they are forming a strategic collaboration to advance generative AI, with the startup selecting Amazon Web Services as its primary cloud provider. Hence, with this investment, Amazon hopes to compete against Microsoft, Meta, Google, and Nvidia in the fast-growing sector that many technologists believe could be the next great frontier.
