Amazon.com Inc yesterday said it would invest up to US$4 billion in cash in the high-profile start-up Anthropic, in an effort to compete with growing cloud rivals on artificial intelligence (AI).
Amazon’s employees and cloud customers would gain early access to technology from Anthropic as part of the deal, which they can infuse into their businesses. The San Francisco-based start-up also committed to primarily relying on Amazon’s cloud services, including training its future AI models on large quantities of proprietary chips it would buy from the online retailing and computing giant.
In a joint interview, the CEOs of Amazon’s cloud division and Anthropic said the immediate investment would be US$1.25 billion, with either party having the authority to trigger another US$2.75 billion in funding by Amazon.
Photo: AFP
They declined to state how much Amazon would own of Anthropic or the start-up’s updated valuation, last estimated at more than US$4 billion.
Amazon said it would not gain a board seat and that its stake amounted to a minority position.
The news represents perhaps Amazon’s biggest answer yet to challenges from Microsoft Corp and Alphabet Inc’s Google, smaller cloud rivals that have marketed or developed powerful AI this year.
For Amazon, yesterday’s deal might spell an uptick in demand, including for chips powering AI. Anthropic agreed to work on developing technology for Amazon’s in-house Trainium and Inferentia chips, for instance.
Amazon Web Services CEO Adam Selipsky said the pact “will help make Anthropic’s models better, will help make our chip technology and our AI infrastructure better.”
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said his company “has obtained the money in a way that allows it to prioritize safety” and “allows us to continue to scale up our models.”
Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI executives, including Amodei, is one of a series of companies building so-called generative AI, systems that can draft content as if a human had created it. Anthropic has aimed to distinguish its work by training AI to adhere to moral values.
The start-up is continuing an agreement it announced with Google in February, Amodei said.
Anthropic is using Google’s custom chips and has planned to make its technology available via Google Cloud and elsewhere.
Yet with yesterday’s deal, Anthropic is giving a boost to Amazon Bedrock, a service that has attracted thousands of users to start building AI applications.
Amazon’s customers would gain features from Anthropic early, such as the ability to customize their AI.
“Both companies are committing that, for many years to come, future versions of Claude will be available on Amazon Bedrock, and that’s important,” Selipsky said
Anthropic’s Claude 2 is an AI model that is able to respond to particularly large prompts, setting it up to analyze long business or legal documents.
Amodei said the deal “allows us to work more closely to drive enterprise usage for Claude,” which he said represented much of the demand on Bedrock so far.
LexisNexis, a data analytics company, is working with Anthropic and Amazon to make its own legal search capabilities more “intelligent,” Amodei said.
Other customers include Bridgewater Associates and Lonely Planet, he added.
Still, Anthropic has yet to gain the name recognition or usage of OpenAI, the company behind the GPT-4 model and ChatGPT, which is one of the fastest-growing software applications in history.
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