Amazon Is Investing Up To $4 Billion In AI Startup Anthropic In Growing Tech Battle

Amazon is investing up to $4 billion in artificial intelligence startup Anthropic and acquiring a minority stake in the company, the two companies announced on Monday.

The investment underscores how Big Tech companies are pouring money into AI as they race to capitalize on the opportunities that the latest iteration of the technology is set to fuel.

According to Amazon and Anthropic, the agreement is part of a larger collaboration to develop so-called foundation models, which are the basis for the generative AI systems that have garnered worldwide attention.

Foundation models, also known as large language models, are trained on vast online information pools, such as blog posts, digital books, scientific articles, and pop songs, to generate text, images, and videos that resemble human labor.

Amazon Is Investing Up To $4 Billion In AI Startup Anthropic In Growing Tech Battle.

Under the terms of the agreement, Anthropic will use Amazon as its primary cloud computing service and train and deploy its generative AI systems using Amazon’s custom processors.

Anthropic, based in San Francisco, was founded by former employees of OpenAI, the creator of the ChatGPT AI chatbot that made a global impact with its ability to generate responses that resembled human responses.

Anthropic has released Claude, its own ChatGPT competitor. The most recent version, available in the United States and the United Kingdom, can “sophisticated dialogue, creative content generation, complex reasoning, and detailed instruction,” according to the company.

Amazon is racing to catch up to competitors such as Microsoft, which invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019 and another multibillion-dollar investment at the beginning of the year.

Amazon has been releasing new services to keep up with the AI arms race, such as an update to its popular assistant Alexa that enables users to have more human-like conversations and AI-generated summaries of consumer product reviews.

SOURCE – (AP)