Amazon is finally inserting itself more prominently in the generative AI discussion, announcing a collaborative partnership with Anthropic to the tune of a $4 billion investment.
ChatGPT and Bard have been a formidable one-two punch when it comes to AI platforms. The driving force behind their popularity have been their resource-laden backers, with Bard created by Google and ChatGPT partnered up with Microsoft in a big way.
Now, Anthropic has its own sugar daddy, but is Amazon too late to the party to seriously compete?
Anthropic and Amazon Enter Partnership
Announced in a press release, Amazon and Anthropic — the company behind the generative AI platform Claude 2 — have entered into a partnership that will see a $4 billion investment in the innovative technology.
“We have tremendous respect for Anthropic’s team and foundation models, and believe we can help improve many customer experiences, short and long-term, through our deeper collaboration.” – Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon
Much like OpenAI's partnership with Microsoft, this means that Amazon will now have a minority ownership position with Anthropic.
In addition to the $4 billion investment and minority ownership, Amazon Web Services (AWS) “will become Anthropic's primary cloud for mission critical workloads, including safety research and future foundation model development.”
Anthropic will also use Amazon's Trainium and Inferentia chips “to build, train, and deploy its future foundation models.”
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How Will Amazon's Investment Boost Anthropic?
Anthropic was founded in 2021 but has been noticeably behind the likes of ChatGPT and Bard due to its lack of resources. After all, when you're competing with Microsoft and Google, it's hard to keep up when it comes to finances and tech infrastructure.
Fortunately, this investment from Amazon should position the company to be more competitive, if only by increasing the bandwidth it will have to manage more and more users.
“By significantly expanding our partnership, we can unlock new possibilities for organizations of all sizes, as they deploy Anthropic’s safe, state-of-the-art AI systems together with AWS’s leading cloud technology.” – Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic
As a result, this new partnership makes it seem like the two-party system of AI chatbots could potentially turn into a free-for-all to see which big tech firm can lock down generative AI dominance in the future. However, the reality is a bit more complicated.
Anthropic's AI Love Triangle
Life is much easier when you can separate entities into neat like boxes: Coke versus Pepsi, McDonald's versus Burger King, Apple versus Android. However, when it comes to generative AI platforms, the waters are much murkier than many realize.
Yes, ChatGPT and its creator OpenAI are partially owned by Microsoft, but the AI company is also partnered with Salesforce, Atlassian, Shutterstock, and a few others.
Anthropic is the same way. While this investment from Amazon is poised to be a primary focus for the company, Anthropic is still also partnered with Google since February this year. Suffice to say, the AI platforms like Anthropic are happy to play the field for the time being in hopes of becoming the go-to solution for users around the world.
