Amazon completed its largest investment in an outside company ever, as it steps up its efforts in the AI race to compete with rivals including Microsoft.
The tech giant made an additional $2.75 billion investment in AI startup Anthropic, it said Wednesday, adding to the initial $1.25 billion it piled into the company in September.
“We have a notable history with Anthropic, together helping organizations of all sizes around the world to deploy advanced generative artificial intelligence applications across their organizations,” Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of data and AI at Amazon Web Services (AWS), said in a statement. “Generative AI is poised to be the most transformational technology of our time, and we believe our strategic collaboration with Anthropic will further improve our customers’ experiences, and look forward to what’s next.”
Anthropic uses AWS as its primary cloud provider for AI safety research and model development. Amazon has also said Anthropic will use AWS’s AI chips, Trainium and Inferentia, “to build, train, and deploy its future models.” Anthropic also has a long-term commitment to give AWS customers access to its future models through Amazon Bedrock, its service that allows companies like Delta Air Lines and Pfizer build their generative AI products, Amazon said.
Earlier this month, Anthropic announced its new family of AI models, Claude 3, which is accessible on Amazon Bedrock. Claude 3 includes Opus, branded as its “most intelligent model,” which Anthropic said outperformed Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s GPT-4 in a range of tasks. In a series of evaluations of industry benchmarks for AI models, including undergraduate- and graduate-level reasoning and common knowledge, Opus outperformed the most advanced version of both ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.
Amazon will keep a minority ownership position in Anthropic, it said.