Amazon has partnered with a new tech startup to help drive growth in generative artificial intelligence.
Amazon.com Inc. announced Monday that it plans to invest up to $4 billion into Anthropic, a San Francisco-based startup that specializes in AI safety and research. Amazon will make an initial $1.25 billion investment to acquire a minority stake in Anthropic with the option to increase its investment to $4 billion at a later time.
Overall, the strategic partnership between the two companies is expected to accelerate growth in generative AI by combining each company’s industry-leading technology and expertise, which would help facilitate the development of reliable and high-performing AI models.
Anthropic’s leading AI model/chatbot, called Claude, is currently capable of performing a wide range of tasks, including generating sophisticated dialogue, complex reasoning, and detailed instruction while also ensuring a high degree of reliability and predictability.
“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.
As part of the collaboration, Anthropic will use Amazon Web Services as its primary cloud-computing provider, in addition to helping build, train, and deploy its future foundation models using AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips — thus “taking advantage of AWS’s high-performance, low-cost machine learning accelerators, Amazon News said in a post on X.
“We are excited to use AWS’s Trainium chips to develop future foundation models,” said Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic. “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.”
With the explosion of generative AI in 2023, many large tech companies like Google, Amazon, and Open AI, among others, are attempting to position themselves as the dominant player in the industry.
“Training state-of-the-art models requires extensive resources including computing power and research programs. Amazon’s investment and supply of AWS Trainium and Inferentia technology will ensure we’re equipped to continue advancing the frontier of AI safety and research,” Anthropic said in its news announcement.
“We look forward to working closely with Amazon to responsibly scale adoption of Claude and deliver safe AI cloud technologies to organizations around the world.”
