As the e-commerce giant ramps up competition with Microsoft, Meta, Google, and Nvidia in the swiftly developing sector many engineers believe could be the next great frontier, the two businesses announced that Amazon has committed to investing up to US$4 billion in the AI start-up Anthropic.
The e-commerce business revealed that it would first invest US$1.25 billion for a minority stake in Anthropic, which runs an AI-powered text-analyzing chatbot like Microsoft-backed OpenAI and Google’s Bard. According to the deal, Amazon has the opportunity to increase its original US$4 billion investment in Anthropic.
Anthropic, which also has Google as an investor, plans to raise $5 billion over the next two years, TechCrunch exclusively disclosed earlier this year. Anthropic, which just this month introduced its first consumer-facing premium subscription plan for the chatbot Claude 2, intends to develop a “frontier model” it has tentatively dubbed “Claude-Next” that will be ten times more effective than the most advanced AI currently available. This information was contained in a 2023 investor deck that TechCrunch obtained earlier this year.
The company did note that over the next 18 months, this development will cost a billion dollars. Amazon is a wealthy strategic investor that Anthropic has found, and it can also provide it with the processing power to build future AI models and then find and offer solutions to many cloud customers.
According to the e-commerce company, as part of the financial arrangement, Anthropic will use Amazon’s cloud behemoth AWS as a primary cloud provider for mission-critical functions like safety research and the creation of future foundation models. Using AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips, Anthropic will design, train, and deploy its future foundation models.
In a statement, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said that the business is certain that a closer partnership with Anthropic will “improve many customer experiences, both short and long term.”
“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.”
A total of US$2.7 billion has been raised for Anthropic to date from investors such as Spark Capital, Salesforce, Sound Ventures, Menlo Ventures, and Zoom. The company was valued at over $5 billion when it received US$450 million in capital in May of this year. How Anthropic was valued in Amazon’s most recent investment was kept a secret.
The partnership with Anthropic enables Amazon to hone its AI capabilities rapidly and build a bigger war chest in the rapidly evolving industry.
Dario Amodei, the CEO and co-founder of Anthropic, said last week that he doesn’t anticipate any challenges to the core technology of his company soon.
“The last ten years, there’s been this remarkable increase in the scale that we’ve used to train neural nets, and we keep scaling them up, and they keep working better and better,” he stated only last week. “That’s the basis of my feeling that what we’re going to see in the next 2, 3, 4 years… what we see today will pale in comparison to that.”
Anthropic has made a “long-term” commitment to providing AWS clients worldwide with future versions of its foundation models through Amazon Bedrock, AWS’s fully managed solution that ensures secure access to the top foundation models in the sector. Additionally, Anthropic will give AWS users early access to brand-new tools for fine-tuning and customizing models.
“Training cutting-edge models necessitates substantial resources, including compute power and research programs.” Anthropic said in a statement, “Amazon’s investment and supply of AWS Trainium and Inferentia technology will ensure we’re equipped to continue advancing the frontier of AI safety and research.” “We look forward to working closely with Amazon to responsibly scale adoption of Claude and deliver safe AI cloud technologies to organizations worldwide.”
