Amazon invests $4B in OpenAI alumni Anthropic, launching AI cloud war with Microsoft and Google

Amazon has reportedly agreed to invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic, an artificial intelligence startup, as the e-commerce giant ramps up competition with Microsoft, Meta, Google, and Nvidia in the burgeoning AI sector. According to TechCrunch, the massive investment underscores Amazon’s aggressive expansion into generative AI.

Initially, Amazon will inject $1.25 billion for a minority stake in Anthropic. Like Google’s Bard and Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic has developed its own AI-powered chatbot called Claude 2.

Anthropic was established in 2021 by former researchers from OpenAI after raising $124 million in initial funding. According to reports, the founders were motivated by concerns surrounding the safety and ethics of advanced AI systems. As such, Anthropic aims to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI) with rigorous safety practices.

Claude features a simple conversational interface akin to ChatGPT. However, Claude has a substantially larger context window of over 25,000 words per conversation compared to ChatGPT’s 2,500-word limitation. With an official context capacity of 100,000 tokens, Claude can ingest extensive written information from users for analysis and feedback. This expanded context enables more nuanced conversations grounded in broader background information.

The future of Anthropic.

As TechCrunch reported, Anthropic aims to build an even more advanced “frontier model” tentatively named Claude-Next, which would be 10 times more capable than today’s top AI systems. However, developing this technology over 18 months could require over $1 billion.

The collaboration with Amazon grants Anthropic vital cloud infrastructure and chips to advance its research. Anthropic will utilize Amazon Web Services for critical workloads and to deploy future models.

In return, TechCrunch reported that AWS customers will gain early access to Anthropic’s proprietary capabilities for customizing and fine-tuning models. Amazon’s Bedrock platform will also integrate future Anthropic models to enable generative AI applications.

The multi-billion dollar deal signals Amazon’s intent to aggressively compete in generative AI, an emerging sector dominated by Microsoft, Google, and startups like Anthropic. With cutting-edge research and Amazon’s cloud resources, Anthropic now has tremendous potential to shape the future of AI.

Amazon recently revealed its upcoming ‘Let’s Talk’ feature for its Alexa home assistants, allowing users to interact aurally with an AI model similar to Anthropic’s Claude.

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