Amazon said Monday it will invest up to $4 billion in artificial intelligence company Anthropic, a company that competes with OpenAI 's ChatGPT developer .
The move underscores Amazon's aggressive AI push as it looks to keep pace with competitors like Microsoft and Google.
Anthropic was founded about two years ago by former OpenAI research executives and recently debuted its new AI chatbot called Claude 2.
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Amazon wants to capitalize on the hype and the promising industry of so-called genetic artificial intelligence, which includes technologies like OpenAI's ChatGPT, as well as Anthropic's Claude chatbots.
The two companies announced Monday they are entering into a strategic partnership to advance genetic artificial intelligence, with the startup choosing Amazon Web Services as its primary cloud. Anthropic said it will provide AWS customers with early access to unique features for model customization and refinement capabilities.
Anthropic will also use custom semiconductors designed by AWS to train the foundational models that power its AI applications. Foundational models are large artificial intelligence programs that are trained on massive amounts of data so they can be adapted to solve a wide range of tasks.
This year, Nvidia is the chip company that has seen the biggest gains from the AI manufacturing boom. Nvidia’s main product is a type of semiconductor known as a graphics processing unit, which can be used to train massive AI models. At one point, Nvidia’s stock rallied more than 200% as the company beat economic forecasts on the growing adoption of AI.
To some extent, the Amazon agreement with Anthropic aims to demonstrate the existence of alternative chip options that can be used for artificial intelligence applications.
AWS customers will be able to build on Anthropic's AI models through Amazon Bedrock — a service that allows customers to build AI applications in the cloud using existing models, rather than training their own models.
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Amazon wants to position itself as a one-stop shop for artificial intelligence. The e-commerce giant is designing its own chips for training massive AI models. Through Amazon Bedrock, customers can also design their own production AI applications using existing models, all of which run in Amazon’s cloud. The company also sells its own AI applications
Anthropic already counts some high-profile backers, including Google and Salesforce Ventures. The support comes as these big companies continue to make big investments in AI companies, a move sparked by Microsoft’s multi-billion dollar investment in ChatGPT maker OpenAI in January.
Source: cnbc.com
