Anthropic, an AI startup firm, has reached an agreement with Amazon in which the e-commerce giant will invest $4B in the smaller firm. This is being regarded as Amazon’s bid to fight against its rivals such as Nvidia, Google, Meta, and Microsoft in the technological sector that is growing rapidly. This is vital since several technologists expect AI to be the latest, greatest frontier.
Anthropic Has A Lot Of Bets
According to Amazon, it will initially acquire a minority stake in Anthropic worth $1.25B. The firm, similar to OpenAI (backed by Microsoft), and Google’s Bard, operates a chatbot that analyzes text using the power of AI. The deal includes an option for Amazon to increase the investment value to $4B in total.
Earlier in the month, Anthropic was reported to be targeting $5B in investments, over the coming 2 years. Google is also one of the investors in the firm. Earlier in September, the firm had also launched its first premium subscription plan for consumers for Claude 2, its chatbot. Anthropic now has the plan to construct a “frontier model”, temporarily known as “Claude-Next”, that is expected to be 10 times as powerful as the best AI that is currently available.
However, the startup also issued a caution that this development will need a minimum spending of $1B over the coming one and a half years. To put into perspective, OpenAI has seen an investment value of about $11B from Microsoft, counting all the years. For the AI firm, Amazon is a strategic investor with deep pockets. The e-commerce giant can also give the startup the computational power needed to construct AI models in the future. Furthermore, they can also help locate and sell Anthropic’s offerings to a substantial number of customers on the cloud. The deal will see Anthropic using AWS, the cloud giant of Amazon, as the primary provider of cloud services.
