Amazon has agreed to invest up to $4 billion in artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, as the e-commerce group ramps up its competition against Microsoft, Meta, Google and Nvidia in the fast-growing sector that many technology experts believe could be a hit. The next great frontier.
The e-commerce group said it would initially invest $1.25 billion to take a minority stake in Anthropic, which, like Google’s Bard and Microsoft-backed OpenAI, also runs an AI-powered chatbot for text analysis. As part of the deal, Amazon said it has the option to increase its investment in Anthropic to a total of $4 billion.
TechCrunch exclusively reported earlier this year that Anthropic, which also counts Google as an investor, plans to raise up to $5 billion over the next two years. Anthropic, which earlier this month launched its first premium, consumer-facing subscription plan for its Claude 2 chatbot, plans to build a “parametric model” — tentatively called “Claude-Next” — that is 10 times more capable than today’s most powerful AI, according to… The 2023 Investor Panel was acquired by TechCrunch earlier this year.
But the startup warned that this development would require spending $1 billion over the next eighteen months. (Microsoft has invested as much as $11 billion in OpenAI over the years.)
In Amazon, Anthropic found a rich strategic investor who could also provide it with the computing power to build future AI models and then find offerings and help sell them to dozens of cloud customers.
As part of the investment agreement, Anthropic will use Amazon’s cloud giant AWS as its primary cloud provider for critical workloads, including safety research and future foundation model development, the e-commerce group said. Anthropic will also use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to build, train, and deploy its future core models. (Anthropic has been an AWS customer since 2021.)
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in a statement that Amazon believes it can help “improve many customer experiences, both in the short and long term, through our deeper collaboration” with Anthropic.
“Customers are very excited about Amazon Bedrock, AWS’s new managed service that enables companies to use different underlying models to build generative AI applications on top of them, as well as AWS Trainium, AWS’s AI training chip, and our collaboration with Anthropic will help customers with Get more value from these two capabilities.
Anthropic — which also counts Spark Capital, Salesforce, Sound Ventures, Menlo Ventures, and Zoom among its backers — has raised a total of $2.7 billion to date. The startup was valued at about $5 billion in May this year when it secured $450 million in a funding round. He did not say how Amazon values Anthropic in the new investment.
The deal with Anthropic allows Amazon, which is increasingly flexing its muscles around artificial intelligence, to build more scale in the feverishly fast-growing industry.
Anthropic CEO and co-founder Dario Amodei told a TechCrunch Disrupt audience last week that he doesn’t see any obstacles on the horizon for his company’s core technology.
“In the last 10 years, there has been this remarkable increase in the scale that we have used to train neural networks and we continue to scale them, and they continue to work better and better,” he said last week. “That’s basically my feeling that what we’re going to see in the next two, three, four years…what we’re seeing today is going to pale in comparison.”
Anthropic has made a “long-term” commitment to providing AWS customers around the world with access to future generations of its foundation models via Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service from AWS that provides secure access to the best foundation models in the industry. Additionally, Anthropic will provide AWS customers with early access to unique model customization features and fine-tuning capabilities.
“Training modern models requires extensive resources including computing power and research software. Amazon’s investment and supply of AWS Trainium and Inferentia technology will ensure we are equipped to continue pushing the boundaries of AI safety and research,” Anthropic said in a statement. “We look forward to working closely with Amazon.” “To responsibly scale cloud adoption and deliver secure AI cloud technologies to enterprises around the world.”