Amazon announced Monday that they plan to invest up to $4 billion in AI firm Anthropic and take a minority stake in the company. This further cements Amazon's commitment to AI as they compete with Microsoft and Alphabet's Google. Additionally, the two companies have formed a strategic collaboration to further progress generative AI, with Anthropic selecting AWS as its primary cloud provider.
Amazon announced on Monday that it will be investing up to $4 billion in AI firm Anthropic and taking a minority ownership stake in the company, indicating its ambition to compete with the likes of Microsoft and Alphabet's Google. Founded two years ago by former OpenAI execs, Anthropic recently launched its AI chatbot, Claude 2. In light of the hype and capability of generative AI, the two companies declared a strategic collaboration to advance the technology, with Anthropic opting for Amazon Web Services as its main cloud provider. This will enable AWS users to access exclusive model customization and fine-tuning features, while Anthropic utilizes AWS-designed semiconductors to construct the foundational models of its AI applications. Foundation models are AI systems trained on large amounts of data in order to accommodate a range of tasks.
This year, the chip firm that has seen the biggest gains from the generative AI surge has been Nvidia. Their main product is the graphics processing unit, a type of semiconductor that can be used to train expansive AI models. Nvidia's share prices have skyrocketed over 200% as they exceeded financial expectations due to the surge in AI implementation. Amazon's recent alliance with Anthropic sets out to demonstrate that there are other chips suitable for AI applications. By using Amazon Bedrock, clients of AWS will be able to access Anthropic's AI models and construct generative AI applications in the cloud with existing models rather than constructing their own.
Amazon seeks to be the go-to destination for AI. They construct their own chips for constructing comprehensive AI models, and through Amazon Bedrock customers are able to craft their own generative AI functions using existing models, all powered by Amazon's cloud. Additionally, the company offers their own AI products. Notable investors, among them Google and Salesforce Ventures, have provided support to Anthropic, a trend that has been accelerated by Microsoft's investment in OpenAI, which produced ChatGPT, back in January of this year.
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