Amazon Invests Billions in AI Startup Anthropic

pcmag.com:

Amazon is investing billions of dollars in AI startup Anthropic in what the company is describing as a "strategic collaboration to advance generative AI."

Amazon has committed to investing up to $4 billion in Anthropic and will take a minority ownership position in the company. It will also become the primary cloud provider for Anthropic's workloads, which will take advantage of AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips "to build, train, and deploy its future foundation models."

In return, Amazon developers and engineers will take advantage of Anthropic's models using Amazon Bedrock to incorporate generative AI into a range of applications, business solutions, and customer experiences.

“We have tremendous respect for Anthropic’s team and foundation models, and believe we can help improve many customer experiences, short and long-term, through our deeper collaboration,” said Andy Jassy, Amazon CEO. From Anthropic's perspective, "The agreement is part of a broader collaboration to develop the most reliable and high-performing foundation models in the industry."

Anthropic first hit the headlines back in March when it announced a "helpful, honest, and harmless" AI rival to ChatGPT called Claude. By May, Claude was capable of reading, remembering, and analyzing 75,000 words in less than 60 seconds. It means entire books can be fed into Claude quickly and complex questions asked about the text immediately.

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former senior members of OpenAI with a company ethos of responsible AI usage. The company describes itself as "an AI safety and research company" that builds "reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems."

Last week, OpenAI unveiled its Dall-E 3 new and improved AI image generator and plans to