Amazon ups generative AI ante with $4B investment in Anthropic
Amazon is pledging to invest up to $4 billion in artificial intelligence (AI) startup Anthropic. Under the partnership, Amazon Web Services (AWS) will be the primary cloud platform for Anthropic’s mission-critical workloads, which include foundation model development, with further plans for the startup to run the majority of its workloads on AWS.
It has been a customer of the cloud vendor since 2021 and made its flagship Claude foundation model available on AWS in April.
Anthropic also will tap AWS’ Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy its future foundation models as well as be involved in the future development of the chip technology.
In addition, future iterations of the AI startup’s foundation models will be made available to AWS’ global customers via Amazon Bedrock, a managed service through which AI models can be accessed with an API.
AWS customers will be given early access to tools that allow them to customize and finetune Anthropic’s AI models, including Claude, using their own data to create private AI models.
Amazon developers and engineers, through Bedrock, can also build Anthropic models to integrate generative AI capabilities into their work.
According to Anthropic, Claude 2 can be used to power a range of tasks, including complex reasoning and creative content production. It added that the AI platform can process vast volumes of data, such as technical and industry-specific documents, for use cases in finance, legal, and coding among others.
Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, said in a statement Monday that Claude had seen “significant organic adoption” among AWS customers since the AI model was added to Amazon Bedrock. The expansion of its collaboration will drive new opportunities to further drive deployment, Amodei said.
He noted that LexisNexis Legal & Professional currently uses a customized Claude 2 model to power its Lexis+ AI application, which facilitates conversational search, summarization, and legal drafting. Lonely Planet is also a Claude 2 customer, tapping the AI model to deliver travel recommendations.
With the investment of up to $4 billion, Amazon said it would assume minority ownership of Anthropic but gave no specifics on what exactly that entailed.
Commenting on the announcement, Nigel Green, CEO of financial advisory deVere Group, said the move highlighted growing tech investment and investor interest in AI, with Amazon stepping up its rivalry against other giants such as Microsoft, Google, and Nvidia in the AI space.
“The AI race is on, with the big tech firms racing to lead in the development, deployment, and utilization of AI technologies,” Green said in a statement. “AI is going to reshape whole industries and fuel innovation. This makes it crucial for investors to pay attention and why almost all investors need exposure to AI investments in their portfolios.”
