Michelle ThompsonAfter Microsoft’s agreement with ChatGPT creator in January, the tech industry plays catch-up.
As part of its effort to keep up with competitors like Microsoft and Google in the race to rule the artificial intelligence market, Silicon Valley behemoth Amazon is investing up to $4 billion (£3.2 billion) in the startup Anthropic, which developed the ChatGPT competitor Claude.
Anthropic, a company created approximately two years ago by former research executives from ChatGPT creator OpenAI, will get an initial $1.25 billion investment from Amazon as part of the terms of the agreement, and Amazon will also acquire a minority ownership in the company.
Amazon stated that it may boost its investment in Anthropic, which recently unveiled its brand-new AI chatbot Claude 2, to a maximum of $4 billion.
The chief executive of Amazon, Andy Jassy, stated, “We have great regard for Anthropic’s team and foundation models and believe we can assist enhance numerous customer experiences, over the short and long terms, through our closer partnership.
Following Microsoft’s multibillion-dollar relationship with OpenAI in January, which includes becoming the company’s sole cloud provider, Amazon has decided to form a strategic partnership with a flourishing AI startup.
The agreement between Anthropic and Amazon stipulates that, although it is not an exclusive partnership, Anthropic would use Amazon Web Services as its primary cloud provider for the “majority of workloads” and use AWS-designed chips in the foundation models that serve as the basis for its AI applications.
Foundation models are sizable AI programs that have been trained on enormous quantities of data and may be customized to handle a variety of tasks.
In order to train and run models, Amazon wants to position its Trainium and Inferentia processors as competitive alternatives to those created by Nvidia, the early industry leader in the generative AI sector.
Anthropic will grant customers who utilize Amazon’s AWS services early access to special tools for “model customisation and fine-tuning capabilities” as part of the agreement.
“By significantly expanding our partnership, we can unlock new possibilities for organizations of all sizes, as they deploy Anthropic’s safe, cutting-edge AI systems together with AWS’s leading cloud technology,” said Dario Amodei, chief executive and co-founder of Anthropic.
One of OpenAI’s primary rivals in the emerging but quickly expanding AI business is Anthropic. Anthropic announced it would train its models on Google’s hardware and use its cloud services after Google invested $300 million in the company last year.
Another competitor, Silicon Valley-based Inflection AI, which has been around for a year, raised $1.3 billion in funding backed by Microsoft and Nvidia in June.
