Amazon investing up to $4 billion in leading-edge AI company
Amazon is betting big on artificial intelligence (AI).
The online giant is entering a strategic collaboration with San Francisco-based generative AI developer Anthropic that includes investing up to $4 billion in the company and taking a minority ownership position. Generative AI is based on machine learning (ML) and can create new content and ideas, including conversations, stories, images, videos, and music.
Anthropic’s generative AI foundation model, Claude, is a competitor with ChatGPT, a generative AI model developed by OpenAI which interacts with users in a conversational style that mimics human interaction and uses machine learning (ML) to continually refine and improve its responses.
According to Anthropic, its current Claude 2 generative AI model can engage sophisticated dialogue and creative content generation, perform complex reasoning and detailed instruction, while maintaining a high degree of reliability and predictability for use across a wide range of industries including retail.
As part of the deal, Anthropic will use Amazon Web Services (AWS) Trainium and Inferentia chips to build, train, and deploy its future foundation models. The two companies will also collaborate in the development of future Trainium and Inferentia technology.
Amazon Bedrock integration
Anthropic is also making a long-term commitment to provide global AWS customers with access to future generations of its foundation models via Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed generative AI service from AWS. In addition, Anthropic will provide AWS customers with early access to features for generative AI model customization and fine-tuning capabilities.
Furthermore, Amazon developers and engineers will be able to build with Anthropic models via Amazon Bedrock.
Amazon delves deeper into AI
Amazon has already been leveraging advanced AI to support initiatives as varied as creating third-party seller product listings, counterfeit detection, inventory handling, and tailoring video shopping content.
In July 2023, Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic and Inflection pledged to follow a set of voluntary commitments proposed by the Biden administration to ensure what the White House termed the “three principles” guiding the future development of AI: safety, security, and trust.
“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, Amazon CEO. “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.”
“We are excited to use AWS’s Trainium chips to develop future foundation models,” said Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic. “Since announcing our support of Amazon Bedrock in April, Claude has seen significant organic adoption from AWS customers. By significantly expanding our partnership, we can unlock new possibilities for organizations of all sizes, as they deploy Anthropic’s safe, state-of-the-art AI systems together with AWS’s leading cloud technology.”