Amazon has announced a major investment in Anthropic, an AI startup that claims to have safer and more reliable chatbot technology than its competitors.
Anthropic is the startup behind the Claude chatbot, which can perform tasks like text translation, code generation, document analysis and more.
According to the company, Claude is different from other chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT because it follows a set of principles that allow it to self-correct its responses instead of relying on human moderators. Claude can also handle longer prompts, which makes it suitable for processing complex documents.
According to Reuters, Amazon will invest up to $4 billion USD (roughly $5.4 billion CAD) in Anthropic. To start, it’s committing $1.25 billion USD (roughly $1.68 billion CAD), with an option to increase the investment by another $2.75 billion USD ($3.7 billion CAD).
This comes soon after the company’s fall hardware event, where it revealed the Echo Show 8, the Echo Hub and more, alongside a new generative AI Alexa.
As part of the investment, Amazon will take a minority stake in Anthropic. Our corporate governance remains unchanged and we’ll continue to be overseen by the Long Term Benefit Trust, in accordance with our Responsible Scaling Policy.
— Anthropic (@AnthropicAI) September 25, 2023
As part of the Anthropic deal, Amazon will gain minority ownership of the startup and integrate its technology into its various businesses, including the Amazon Bedrock service for building AI applications. Additionally, Anthropic will use Amazon’s custom chips to develop, train and deploy its future AI foundation models, and will use AWS as its primary cloud provider.
With the sheer amount of tech giants inventing or building on AI, it is evident that Amazon did not want to be left behind. If the deal reaches its full $4 billion USD (roughly $5.4 billion CAD) potential, it will be the largest known investment ever related to Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Earlier this year, Google too made a $300 million investment in Anthropic earlier this year. Anthropic says that it will continue its partnership with Google despite the new Amazon deal and that it will make its technology available via Google Cloud.
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