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E-commerce giant Amazon on Monday said it would invest as much as $4 billion in artificial intelligence firm Anthropic and take a minority ownership position in the corporate.
The move underscores Amazon’s aggressive AI push because it looks to maintain pace with rivals akin to Microsoft and Alphabet’s Google.
Anthropic was founded roughly two years ago by former OpenAI research executives and recently debuted its latest AI chatbot called Claude 2.
Amazon is seeking to capitalize on the hype and promise of so-called generative AI, which incorporates technology like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, in addition to Anthropic’s Claude chatbots.
The two firms on Monday said that they’re forming a strategic collaboration to advance generative AI, with the startup choosing Amazon Web Services as its primary cloud provider. Anthropic said it would provide AWS customers with early access to unique features for model customization and fine-tuning capabilities.
Anthropic can even use custom AWS-designed semiconductors to coach the foundational models that underpin its AI applications. Foundation models are large AI programs trained on vast amounts of information in order that they might be adapted to resolve a big selection of tasks.
This 12 months, chip firm Nvidia is the chip firm that has seen the largest gains from the generative AI boom. Nvidia’s key product is a sort of semiconductor often known as a graphics processing unit, which might be used to coach huge AI models. At one point Nvidia’s stock had rallied greater than 200%, as the corporate smashed through financial forecasts on the rising adoption of AI.
To an extent, Amazon’s take care of Anthropic goals to point out that there are alternative chips that might be used for AI applications.
AWS customers will find a way to construct on Anthropic’s AI models via Amazon Bedrock — a service that lets customers construct generative AI applications within the cloud via existing models, slightly than train their very own models.
Amazon is seeking to position itself because the one-stop shop for AI. The e-commerce giant designs its own chips for training huge AI models. Through Amazon Bedrock customers may also design their very own generative AI applications using existing models, that are all run on the Amazon cloud. The company sells its own AI applications too.
Anthropic already counts some high-profile backers, including Google and Salesforce Ventures. This support comes as tech giants proceed to make massive bets on AI corporations, a move sparked by Microsoft’s multi-billion dollar investment in ChatGPT maker OpenAI in January.
