Amazon has announced an additional 2.75 billion dollars in investment in the San Francisco-based generative AI startup Anthropic, making it a total of 4 billion dollars.
This is quite surprising, as the investment is one of the biggest from the company over the last few decades; however, in order to stay at the top of the competition, this move could prove to be beneficial.
Anthropic’s foundation model and chatbot, called Claude, aims to compete with OpenAI and ChatGPT.
Amazon’s largest-ever venture investment is a significant addition to the partnership between artificial intelligence and technology giants. For instance, consider Google and Microsoft, who have been striving hard to advance their technologies.
The startup has achieved great milestones, given that it was founded just three years ago. However, it’s no surprise as former OpenAI executives and researchers founded Anthropic.
Reportedly, the company has bagged five investments of more than 7 billion dollars. Thus, it was last valued at 18.4 billion dollars, which is about 4.5 times more than the value in early 2023.
The vice president of Data and AI at Amazon Web Services, Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian, stated in the company’s post,
Generative AI is poised to be the most transformational technology of our time, and we believe our strategic collaboration with Anthropic will further improve our customers’ experiences, and look forward to what’s next.
The deal between Anthropic and Amazon has made AWS the primary cloud provider of Anthropic. Not only this, but from now on, the artificial intelligence company will use Amazon’s custom chips to create, teach and place its AI models.
Meanwhile, Anthropic’s funding worth billions will continue to increase its value even more. It is clear that companies like Microsoft and Amazon, which are unable to develop their own advanced AI models for several potential reasons, are bound to take help from other AI ventures, such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
