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Amazon has agreed to invest up to $4 billion in the AI startup Anthropic as the e-commerce group steps up rivalry against Microsoft, Meta, Google and Nvidia in the fast-growing sector that many technologists believe could be the next great frontier.<\/p>\n
The e-commerce group said it will initially invest $1.25 billion for a minority stake in Anthropic, which like Google\u2019s Bard and Microsoft-backed OpenAI, also operates an AI-powered, text analyzing chatbot. As part of the deal, Amazon said it has an option to increase its investment in Anthropic to a total of $4 billion.<\/p>\n
TechCrunch reported exclusively earlier this year that Anthropic, which also counts Google as an investor, plans to raise as much as $5 billion<\/a> over the next two years. Anthropic, which earlier this month launched its first consumer-facing premium subscription plan<\/a> of chatbot Claude 2, plans to build a \u201cfrontier model\u201d \u2014 tentatively called \u201cClaude-Next\u201d \u2014 that is 10 times more capable than today\u2019s most powerful AI, according to an investor deck TechCrunch obtained earlier this year.<\/p>\n But this development, the startup cautioned, will require a billion dollars in spending over the next 18 months. (Microsoft has invested as much as $11 billion in OpenAI<\/a> over the years.)<\/p>\n Enters Amazon.<\/p>\n As part of the deal with Amazon, Anthropic will use AWS as a primary cloud provider for mission critical workloads, including safety research and future foundation model development, the e-commerce group said. Anthropic will additionally use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to build, train, and deploy its future foundation models.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have tremendous respect for Anthropic\u2019s team and foundation models, and believe we can help improve many customer experiences, short and long-term, through our deeper collaboration,\u201d said Andy Jassy, Amazon chief executive, in a statement.<\/p>\n \u201cCustomers are quite excited about Amazon Bedrock, AWS\u2019s new managed service that enables companies to use various foundation models to build generative AI applications on top of, as well as AWS Trainium, AWS\u2019s AI training chip, and our collaboration with Anthropic should help customers get even more value from these two capabilities.\u201d<\/p>\n Anthropic \u2014 which also counts Spark Capital, Salesforce, Sound Ventures, Menlo Ventures, and Zoom among its backers \u2014 has now raised a total of $2.7 billion. It was valued at about $5 billion in May this year when it secured $450 million<\/a>. The startup didn\u2019t say how Amazon valued Anthropic in the new investment.<\/p>\n The deal with Anthropic gives Amazon, which is increasingly flexing its own muscles around AI<\/a>, a front row seat at one of the fastest growing AI startups. Anthropic chief executive and co-founder Dario Amodei told TechCrunch Disrupt audience last week that he doesn\u2019t see any barriers on the horizon<\/a> for his company\u2019s key technology.<\/p>\n \u201cThe last 10 years, there\u2019s been this remarkable increase in the scale that we\u2019ve used to train neural nets and we keep scaling them up, and they keep working better and better,\u201d he said last week. \u201cThat\u2019s the basis of my feeling that what we\u2019re going to see in the next 2, 3, 4 years\u2026 what we see today is going to pale in comparison to that.\u201d<\/p>\n Amazon said as part of the deal,\u00a0Anthropic has made a \u201clong-term\u201d commitment to provide AWS customers around the world with access to future generations of its foundation models via Amazon Bedrock, AWS\u2019s fully managed service that provides secure access to the industry\u2019s top foundation models. In addition, Anthropic will provide AWS customers with early access to unique features for model customization and fine-tuning capabilities.<\/p>\n \u201cTraining state-of-the-art models requires extensive resources including compute power and research programs. Amazon\u2019s investment and supply of AWS Trainium and Inferentia technology will ensure we\u2019re equipped to continue advancing the frontier of AI safety and research,\u201d said Anthropic in a statement. \u201cWe look forward to working closely with Amazon to responsibly scale adoption of Claude and deliver safe AI cloud technologies to organizations around the world.\u201d<\/p>\n