In exchange for a stake in the artificial intelligence business Anthropic and increased access to Amazon Web Services (AWS), the e-commerce behemoth’s cloud computing infrastructure, Amazon announced on Monday that it will invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic.
The two companies’ growing relationship demonstrates how some big tech companies with abundant cloud computing resources are increasingly utilizing those resources to establish stronger positions in AI.
According to the agreement, AWS will take over as Anthropic’s “primary” cloud provider, with the AI firm utilizing Amazon’s cloud platform for “the majority” of its research into AI safety and the development of AI models. This will include utilizing Amazon’s assortment of custom AI processors.
“Customers are quite excited about Amazon Bedrock, AWS’s new managed service that enables companies to use various foundation models to build generative AI applications on top of, as well as AWS Trainium, AWS’s AI training chip, and our collaboration with Anthropic should help customers get even more value from these two capabilities,” said Andy Jassy, Amazon CEO.
Anthropic’s Claude
Anthropic, which runs a chatbot named Claude, has made an effort to establish itself as one of the most ethical players in the sector. Its executives have cautioned that if artificial intelligence is not created cautiously, it might harm society greatly. Co-founder of the company Jack Clark recently attended a meeting on Capitol Hill to talk about A.I. legislation, including the dangers and opportunities of the quickly developing technology.
It is now practically hard for smaller enterprises to continue to operate independently from established tech giants with significant wallets due to the enormous amounts of money and processing power required to run A.I. models. However, up until its partnership with Anthropic, Amazon had not been as active in the space as Google and Microsoft, who both support OpenAI and have teamed with businesses like Cohere.
Anthropic will use AWS as its main cloud service provider and will run the majority of its workload there. Anthropic will commit over the long term to giving AWS customers all over the world access to the next iterations of its foundation models as well as early access to special customization options.
