Amazon announced a strategic partnership and investment arrangement with generative AI startup Anthropic recently.
Anthropic was founded by a group of engineers who broke away from OpenAI when they became concerned with that company’s partnership with Microsoft and the focus on monetizing their gen AI model.
But the reality of AI models is that they require a lot of computing power to train.
That computing power is held by big tech companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft.
Anthropic had originally received funding from Google which infused the company with $300 million in exchange for a 10% stake of the company and an agreement to use Google’s cloud.
This latest agreement is a change of direction and makes Amazon’s AWS platform the primary processing platform for Anthropic’s generative AI tool called Claude.
In exchange, Amazon agreed to invest $4 billion in the company with an immediate infusion of $1.25 billion.
Amazon was already offering access to multiple AI models via its Amazon Bedrock foundation models, including AI21, Cohere, Meta, Stability AI, and Anthropic.
This new investment was described by Amazon as a “deeper relationship between the companies”, but it makes it seem like Anthropic is now Amazon’s primary AI model.
This story continues to repeat itself with small AI startups partnering up with the Big Tech companies that many predicted they would make irrelevant.
But Big Tech’s huge data warehouses and seemingly endless cash reserves make them very relevant to these companies.
Similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude 2.0 employs a text messaging interface in which users can interact with the AI asking questions in a conversational style.
Claude 2.0 went into general release in July 2023.
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