Amazon has agreed to invest up to $4 billion in artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, as the e-commerce group steps up its rivalry against Microsoft, Meta, Google and Nvidia in the fast-growing sector that many technologists believe could be the next big thing. border.
The e-commerce group said it will initially invest $1.250 billion in a minority stake in Anthropic, which like Bard and Google's OpenAI also operates an AI-powered text analysis chatbot. As part of the deal, Amazon said it has the option to increase its investment in Anthropic to a total of $4 billion.
Earlier this year Anthropic, which also counts Google as an investor, had planned to raise up to $5.000 billion over the next two to three years. Anthropic, which earlier this month announced the launch of its first consumer-facing premium subscription plan for its Claude 2 chatbot, plans to build a "frontier model," tentatively called "Claude-Next," that is 10 times more powerful than the most powerful of current AI.
But this advance, the startup warned, will require spending $18 billion over the next 11 months. Microsoft has invested up to $XNUMX billion in OpenAI over the years.
In Amazon, Anthropic has found a deep-pocketed strategic investor who can also provide it with computing power to build future AI models and then find and help sell the offerings to dozens of cloud customers.
As part of an agreement with Amazon, Anthropic will use AWS as a primary cloud provider for mission-critical workloads, including security research and future development of basic models, the group said. E-commerce. Anthropic will also use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to build, train and deploy your future models basics. Anthropic has been an AWS customer since 2021.)
Amazon believes it can help “improve many customer experiences, in the short and long term, through our deeper collaboration” with Anthropic, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in a statement.
“Customers are very excited about Amazon Bedrock, the new managed service from AWS that allows companies to use several foundation models to build generative AI applications in addition to AWS Trainium, the AWS AI training chip, and our collaboration with Anthropic “should help customers get even more value from these two capabilities.”
Anthropic, which also counts Spark Capital, Salesforce, Sound Ventures, Menlo Ventures and Zoom among its partners, has raised a total of $2.700 billion. It was valued at about $5.000 billion in May of this year, when it raised the final $450 million in that round.
The deal with Anthropic gives Amazon, which is increasingly flexing its own muscles around AI, a front-row seat as one of the fastest-growing AI startups.
Source: Goldman Sachs
Anthropic CEO and co-founder Dario Amodei said he doesn't see any barriers on the horizon for his company's key technology.
“Over the last 10 years, there has been a notable increase in the scale we have used to train neural networks and we continue to scale them up, and they continue to perform better and better. That is the basis of my feeling that what we will see in the next 2, 3, 4 years… what we see today will pale in comparison to that »he added.
Amazon said that as part of the agreement, Anthropic has made a “long-term” commitment to providing AWS customers around the world access to future versions of your basic models through Amazon Bedrock, AWS's fully managed service that provides secure access to the industry's best foundational services. Additionally, Anthropic will provide AWS customers with early access to unique features for model customization and tuning capabilities.
“Training next-generation models requires extensive resources, including computing power and research programs. “Amazon’s investment and provision of AWS Trainium and Inferentia technology will ensure we are equipped to continue advancing the frontier of AI security and research,” Anthropic said. “We look forward to working closely with Amazon to responsibly scale Claude adoption and deliver secure cloud AI technologies to organizations around the world.”
