Reports say that Amazon has agreed to spend up to $4 billion on Anthropic, a startup that works with artificial intelligence. This comes as the e-commerce giant steps up its competition in the growing AI market with Microsoft, Meta, Google, and Nvidia. TechCrunch says that the huge investment shows how quickly Amazon is expanding into creative AI.
Amazon will put $1.25 billion into Anthropic at first to buy a small stake in the company. Anthropic’s AI-powered chatbot Claude 2 is akin to Google’s Bard and OpenAI’s Microsoft-backed ChatGPT.
Anthropic was started in 2021 by researchers who used to work at OpenAI. They raised $124 million in the first round of funding. The creators reportedly worried about the safety and morality of powerful AI systems. In this way, Anthropic wants to create artificial general intelligence (AGI) while following strict safety rules.
Claude has a simple chat interface that looks a lot like ChatGPT. ChatGPT, on the other hand, only lets you use 2,500 words per conversation, while Claude lets you use over 25,000 words per discussion. Claude can take in a lot of written information from users for analysis and feedback. His stated context capacity is 100,000 tokens. This wider context lets people have more nuanced conversations based on more background knowledge.
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What’s next for Anthropic?
According to TechCrunch, Anthropic wants to make a 10 times smarter “frontier model” that they are loosely calling Claude-Next to make their AI even smarter. However, it might cost more than $1 billion to build this technology over 18 months.
Anthropic gets important cloud technology and chips from its partnership with Amazon, which helps it move its research forward. Anthropic will use Amazon Web Services for important tasks and to set up new models.
TechCrunch said that in exchange, AWS users will get early access to Anthropic’s private features for making models more specific and accurate. Future Anthropic models will be incorporated to Amazon’s Bedrock platform for generative AI apps.
Amazon hopes to compete in generative AI, a new field dominated by Microsoft, Google, and startups like Anthropic, with the multibillion-dollar deal. Anthropic has a huge chance to change the future of AI now that it has access to cutting-edge research and Amazon’s cloud tools.
Amazon just recently announced that its future “Let’s Talk” feature for its Alexa home assistants will let users talk to an AI model like Anthropic’s Claude.
