As the e-commerce giant ramps up competition against Microsoft, Meta, Google, and Nvidia in the quickly expanding industry that many engineers feel could be the next big frontier, Amazon has agreed to invest up to 4 billion in the AI company Anthropic.
The e-commerce company announced that it will first spend 1.25 billion for a minority investment in Anthropic, which, like Microsoft-backed OpenAI and Google’s Bard, runs an AI-powered chatbot that analyzes text. According to the agreement, Amazon has the option to boost its initial 4 billion investment in Anthropic.
Earlier this year, TechCrunch exclusively revealed that Anthropic, which has Google as an investor, intends to raise up to 5 billion in the next two years. According to an investor deck TechCrunch obtained earlier this year, Anthropic, which launched its first consumer-facing premium subscription plan of chatbot Claude 2 earlier this month, plans to build a “frontier model” — tentatively named “Claude-Next” — that is 10 times more capable than today’s most potent AI.
However, the startup warned that over the following 18 months, this development will cost a billion dollars. (Over the years, Microsoft has made up to 11 billion in investments in OpenAI.)
Gets inside Amazon.
As per the agreement, Anthropic will use AWS as its main cloud provider for mission-critical workloads, such as future foundation model development and safety research, according to the e-commerce company. In addition, Anthropic plans to develop, train, and implement its upcoming foundation models using AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips.
The chief executive of Amazon, Andy Jassy, stated in a statement, /”We have enormous respect for Anthropic’s team and foundation models, and we believe we can help improve many customer experiences, short and long-term, through our deeper collaboration./”
Customers are thrilled about AWS Trainium, the AI training chip, and Amazon Bedrock, a new managed service that allows businesses to use a variety of foundation models to build generative AI applications. Our partnership with Anthropic should help customers get even more value from these two capabilities.
With 2.7 billion raised thus far, Anthropic, which also has support from Spark Capital, Salesforce, Sound Ventures, Menlo Ventures, and Zoom, is well-funded. When it obtained 450 million in May of this year, its estimated value was 5 billion. The startup withheld the amount that Amazon paid for Anthropic in the latest funding round.
With the Anthropic transaction, Amazon, which is progressively asserting its influence in the AI space, gains first dibs on one of the fastest-growing AI businesses. Dario Amodei, the co-founder and chief executive of Anthropic, stated to the TechCrunch Disrupt audience last week that he sees no impediments in the way of his company’s revolutionary technology.
He stated last week, /”There has been this remarkable increase in the scale that we’ve used to train neural nets over the last ten years, and we keep scaling them up, and they work better and better./” /”That’s the reason I think what we see now will be nothing compared to what we see in the next two, three, and four years./”
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