ECONOMY
Amazon To Invest Up To $4 Billion in OpenAI Competitor Anthropic
Courtesy of @AnthropicAI/X
Amazon on Monday announced an investment of up to $4 billion in generative artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, a top competitor to Microsoft-backed OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT and GPT-4.
As part of the “strategic collaboration” announced on Monday, Anthropic agreed to use Amazon Web Services as its primary cloud provider, and will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to “build, train, and deploy its future foundation models,” which are broad AI models that can be used as the base for other applications.
Anthropic will also provide AWS customers with access to future generations of its foundation models via Amazon Bedrock, which makes foundation models available through an API. AWS customers will also get early access to unique features for model customization and fine-tuning capabilities, Amazon said.
Amazon put up an initial $1.25 billion investment for a minority ownership stake in the two-year-old AI firm, and that investment could go up to $4 billion.
“We have tremendous respect for Anthropic’s team and foundation models, and believe we can help improve many customer experiences, short and long-term, through our deeper collaboration,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in a statement.
“Customers are quite excited about Amazon Bedrock, AWS’s 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’s AI training chip, and our collaboration with Anthropic should help customers get even more value from these two capabilities,” Jassy said.
Anthropic, which advocates for safety in the AI space, is known for its foundation models Claude and Claude 2, which can handle dialogue, content generation, and complex reasoning, according to the company.
“We are excited to use AWS’s Trainium chips to develop future foundation models,” said Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic. “Since announcing our support of Amazon Bedrock in April, Claude has seen significant organic adoption from AWS customers. By significantly expanding our partnership, we can unlock new possibilities for organizations of all sizes, as they deploy Anthropic’s safe, state-of-the-art AI systems together with AWS’s leading cloud technology.”
According to Amazon, AWS customers using Amazon Bedrock to access Anthropic’s current models are using them to build AI-powered applications to automate tasks such as “producing market forecasts, developing research reports, enabling new drug discovery for healthcare, and personalizing education programs.”
Enterprise customers already making use of the technology include travel media company Lonely Planet and LexisNexis Legal & Professional, Amazon said.
“We are developing a generative AI solution on AWS to help customers plan epic trips and create life-changing experiences with personalized travel itineraries,” said Chris Whyde, senior vice president of Engineering and Data Science at Lonely Planet. “By building with Claude 2 on Amazon Bedrock, we reduced itinerary generation costs by nearly 80 percent when we quickly created a scalable, secure AI platform that organizes our book content in minutes to deliver cohesive, highly accurate travel recommendations.”
LexisNexis, meanwhile, is also working on a custom Claude 2 model with “with cutting-edge encryption, data privacy, and safe AI technology.”
“Our new Lexis+ AI platform technology features conversational search, insightful summarization, and intelligent legal drafting capabilities, which enable lawyers to increase their efficiency, effectiveness, and productivity.”
“This partnership is one of many examples Amazon brings to provide speed and to leverage customers’ data sets in a safe and scalable environment. By offering a choice of foundational models to the developers, data scientists, and consultants, the time to market is faster,” said AI adviser and tech executive Marva Bailer, author of “Be Unexpected: Resetting Routines to Revolutionize the Future of Work.”
“These new foundational models are suited for complex tasks which require pattern recognition, variety of data input types, and nuanced understanding,” Bailer said.
“An API is a secure method that allows a query or request [to] retrieve and download data in machine readable format. Relatable examples are NOAA API for weather data, National Library of Medicine API for medical data, World Bank API, in addition to the enterprise’s own data specific to their application,” Bailer said. “Data is king in this ecosystem.”
TMX contributed to this article.
