Amazon commits $4 billion investment in AI start-up Anthropic
Amazon announced on Monday its plans to invest up to $4 billion in artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Anthropic, as it seeks to compete with tech giants like Microsoft, Meta, Google, and NVIDIA in the rapidly growing AI sector. The e-commerce behemoth will initially invest $1.25 billion for a minority stake in Anthropic, with an option to increase its investment to a total of $4 billion.
Anthropic's ambitious "Claude-Next" AI model
Anthropic, backed by Salesforce, Sound Ventures, Spark Capital, Menlo Ventures, Zoom, as well as Google, plans to create a "frontier model" called "Claude-Next," which will be 10 times more capable than today's most powerful AI. With Amazon's investment, the start-up will gain access to AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to build, train, and deploy its future foundation models.
Strengthening AI collaboration with AWS
As part of the collaboration with Anthropic, Amazon will use AWS as its primary cloud provider for mission-critical workloads, including safety research and future foundation model development. The partnership aims to enhance customer experiences through AI, with Amazon's new managed service, Amazon Bedrock, enabling companies to build generative AI applications on top of various foundation models.
Expanding global access via Amazon Bedrock
Anthropic has made a long-term commitment to provide AWS customers worldwide with access to future generations of its foundation models via Amazon Bedrock, AWS's fully managed service that offers secure access to top foundation models. The start-up will also grant AWS customers early access to unique features for model customization and fine-tuning capabilities. This commitment will help organizations globally deliver safe AI cloud technologies.
