Amazon is going to invest another $4 billion in Anthropic – the AI startup — which is biting at the heels of OpenAI and Google’s Gemini.
This is the second sizeable investment the ecommerce giant has made in the San Francisco-based company. Just over a year ago, it signed over $4 billion putting itself in a minority ownership position.
As part of this new deal, Anthropic has named AWS as its “primary training partner” and adds that it will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy its large foundation models, as it takes on ChatGPT with its Claude chatbot.
‘Deepening Collaboration’
The new deal builds on Amazon’s use of Anthropic’s models to power Amazon’s Bedrock,” says the Amazon team.
“We’ve been impressed by Anthropic’s pace of innovation and commitment to responsible development of generative AI, and look forward to deepening our collaboration.” – Matt Garman, the chief executive of AWS in a blog post
Garman adds that the deal will allow Amazon to “keep pushing the boundaries of what customers can achieve with generative AI technologies.”
This will include allowing AWS customers early access to be able to do “fine-tuning with their own data” on Anthropic models.
Anthropic as Partner and Customer
Anthropic is Amazon’s customer as well as its business partner. The AI venture uses Amazon’s cloud-computing platform, semiconductors, and data centers, which means that some of this investment will actually be paid back to Amazon.
The two companies are aligned in their focus on the enterprise space while OpenAI’s ChatGPT is very much driven by individual subscriptions.
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Raising Finance
This sizeable boost for Anthropic comes just weeks after OpenAI announced it had raised $6.6 billion, and its company valuation had now hit $157 billion. Microsoft made a $10 billion investment in OpenAI back in January 2023.
Another contender for the AI throne, Elon Musk’s generative AI startup xAI, raised $5 billion in a funding round and now has a value of $50 billion, reported the Wall Street Journal.