Microsoft backs Open AI and ChatGPT. Google has its own AI platform with Bard, And Elon Musk has xAI.
Now, Amazon wants a piece of the AI pie too. And they’re getting it by investing billions into a popular, but still under-the-radar AI startup.
Anthropic future
E-commerce giant Amazon is making a huge investment into Anthropic, an artificial intelligence startup known for creating the Claude chatbot.
In fact, Claude has recently become my favorite AI tool, easily beating ChatGPT and Bard with its sleek interface, speed, up-to-date information, and well-versed output. All for free.
Amazon announced this week it will provide a whopping $4 billion in funding to Anthropic in order to advance Amazon’s capabilities in conversational AI.
This is enormous news.
Competitive market
While not as large as Microsoft’s reported $13 billion investment into leading AI firm OpenAI (and ChatGPT), Amazon’s deal represents a major play to stake its claim in the rapidly accelerating AI technology space.
Amazon seems eager to integrate Anthropic’s natural language AI into its various products and services. This could mean Claude AI in many products & services.
Who’s behind Anthropic & Claude
Anthropic was founded by Dario and Daniela Amodei, two siblings who previously worked together at OpenAI, the top AI research lab behind chatbot ChatGPT.
Their Claude chatbot, along with the updated Claude 2, utilizes large language models similar to ChatGPT. This allows Claude to generate human-like text, answer questions, summarize documents, write code, and more based on massive datasets.
However, Anthropic says Claude has advantages over rival chatbots due to built-in safety features guided by the startup’s Constitutional AI principles.
Claude can apparently correct its own responses instead of needing human oversight. Its knowledge and reasoning abilities also enable it to respond to longer, more complex prompts, making Claude suited for parsing various lengthy text forms. Claude 2 can handle up to 100K tokens.
Amazon’s bet for the future
As part of the investment deal, Amazon will gain a minority ownership stake in Anthropic.
More importantly, Amazon has the right to implement Anthropic’s AI technology across its vast range of products and services.
This includes incorporating Claude-like conversational abilities into Amazon’s digital assistant Alexa. Integration with Amazon’s Bedrock business AI tool is another key use case.
To support the development of future models like Claude, Anthropic will leverage Amazon’s advanced chips and have access to leading-edge AWS cloud computing capabilities.
Anthropic is committing to make AWS its primary cloud provider under a separate agreement.
Amazon & Google both support Anthropic
Initially, Amazon is investing $1.25 billion into Anthropic. But based on performance milestones, Amazon will increase the total investment amount to the full $4 billion figure.
Anthropic will maintain its existing partnership with Google, despite Amazon’s rival status. Google previously invested $300 million into Anthropic in 2022.
With Google holding approximately 10% stake, Anthropic plans to still make its AI available through Google Cloud.
The bottom line
The massive investment by Amazon represents its eagerness to compete with OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and others in the race to lead the AI technology wave.
Only Apple seems to be left behind in this race right now, not having shared or shown any active interested in similar technology.
With advanced natural language processing capabilities, huge datasets, and virtually unlimited computing power, conversational AI promises to transform how humans interact with machines.
Anthropic’s Claude chatbot provides Amazon with a new channel to deliver the AI experience to billions of consumers.
This is just the beginning…
