Amazon said that it has poured an additional $2.75 billion into the artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Antrhopic. Overall, the tech giant has made an investment of $4 billion in the start-up.
Last September, Amazon made an initial investment of $1.25 billion in Antrhopic. “Today, we made our additional $2.75 billion investment, bringing our total investment in Anthropic to $4 billion,” as per the company 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. We look forward to what’s next,” said Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of data and AI at Amazon Web Services (AWS).
As part of the collaboration, AWS is being used by Antrhopic as its primary cloud provider “for mission-critical workloads, including safety research and future foundation model development.” Antrhopic will also be using AWS’s Trainium and Inferentia chips. This will be used to build, train, and deploy its future models.
In a statement last year, Amazon wrote, “Through our expanded partnership, Anthropic made a long-term commitment to AWS customers around the world, with access to future generations of its foundation models with Amazon Bedrock. In simple words, Amazon Bedrock allows its users to build their own generative AI applications. “You can choose from a wide range of foundation models to find the model that is best suited for your use case,” reads a statement by Amazon.
Amazon has said that companies such as ADP, Amdocs, Bridgewater Associates, Broadridge, CelcomDigi, Clariant, Cloudera, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Degas Ltd., Delta Air Lines, Simens, and others are already using Amazon Bedrock.
Tech giants have been making major investments in AI. According to a report by CNBC, in 2023, Google committed an investment of $2 billion in Anthropic. The tech giant already invested $300 million in Antrhopic in late 2022, as per the Financial Times.
Antrhopic is seen as the rival of OpenAI. Interestingly, the founders of Antrhopic, Dario Amodei, and his sister, Daniela, both worked at OpenAI. They quit in 2021 to start their own venture. Since then, the company has become a much-talked-about start-up, raising $450 million from investors in May 2023.
