Big billion-dollar deals haven’t gone out of fashion in the tech sector, and news of the latest such investment comes from Amazon as it scrambles to build its Artificial Intelligence (AI) arsenal, in a market where Open AI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini are making the most noise. Amazon has made a fresh investment of US$ 2.75 Billion in Anthropic, a San Fransico-based start-up that is viewed as a force to reckon with in the field of AI.
This is Amazon’s second investment into Anthropic after it originally announced investment plans last year.
“Last September, we made an initial investment of US$ 1.25 Billion. Today, we made our additional US$ 2.75 Billion investment, bringing our total investment in Anthropic to US$ 4 Billion,” Amazon said in an official statement.
Anthropic is using Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its primary cloud provider for mission critical workloads, including safety research and future foundation model development. The statement further explained, “Anthropic will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to build, train, and deploy its future models and has made a long-term commitment to provide AWS customers around the world with access to future generations of its foundation models on Amazon Bedrock, AWS’s fully managed service that provides secure, easy access to the industry’s widest choice of high-performing, fully managed foundation models (FMs), along with the most compelling set of features (including best-in-class retrieval augmented generation, guardrails, model evaluation, and AI-powered agents) that help customers build highly-capable, cost-effective, low latency generative AI applications.”
Earlier, in March, Amazon had announced access to the most powerful Anthropic AI models on Amazon Bedrock. Amazon says, “The Claude 3 family of models demonstrate advanced intelligence, near-human levels of responsiveness, improved steerability and accuracy, and new vision capabilities. Industry benchmarks show that Claude 3 Opus, the most intelligent of the model family, has set a new standard, outperforming other models available today—including OpenAI’s GPT-4—in the areas of reasoning, math, and coding.”
“We have a notable history with Anthropic, together helping organizations of all sizes around the world to deploy advanced generative artificial intelligence applications across their organizations,” said Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of Data and AI at AWS. “Anthropic’s visionary work with generative AI, most recently the introduction of its state-of-the art Claude 3 family of models, combined with Amazon’s best-in-class infrastructure like AWS Tranium and managed services like Amazon Bedrock further unlocks exciting opportunities for customers to quickly, securely, and responsibly innovate with generative AI. 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.”
