2024-03-28 11:52:16
One thing promised, one due: Amazon has just invested an additional $2.75 billion in generative AI start-up Anthropic, bringing its total effort to $4 billion, as announced in September. With this new investment, the champion of e-commerce intends to stay in the race for artificial intelligence, facing Microsoft which has invested, for its part, up to 10 billion dollars in OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT and great rival from Anthropic.
Founded in 2021 in San Francisco by OpenAI alumni, Anthropic is a rising star in AI: its valuation has already reached $15 billion, according to the “New York Times”. Its latest model, Claude3, is starting to overshadow GPT-4, OpenAI’s most recent model yet considered the gold standard in the market.
A success that did not go unnoticed: in September, Amazon had already invested $1.25 billion in Anthropic, thus becoming a minority shareholder but its main financial and strategic support. Amazon then explained that it could go up to 4 billion. The group had until the end of March to bring in the balance. So it’s done.
No exclusive link
By approaching Anthropic in this way, Amazon places itself in pole position to recover the start-up’s innovations and integrate them into its own activities and products. Generative AI could thus make voice assistants, like that of Amazon (Alexa), much more “human” and more intelligent. Amazon will also be able to offer Anthropic’s AI models to its customers who purchase the cloud, via Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world number one in the sector.
Conversely, Anthropic secures computing power, essential for training its AI models: the start-up will be able to rent AWS servers at preferential rates. And AWS thus recovers a large customer. Along the same lines, Anthropic has also committed to using electronic chips designed in-house by Amazon, including Trainium and Inferentia. Amazon will thus be able to benefit from customer experience feedback for its chips and gain market share against the American Nvidia, which exercises a virtual monopoly on the market for chips for AI.
Unlike the link between Microsoft and OpenAI, the partnership between Amazon and Anthropic is not exclusive. The start-up also has very strong ties with Google: at the end of 2023, the search giant had promised to invest up to 2 billion dollars in Anthropic. The young AI star also uses Google Cloud servers and the electronic chips that Google makes available to him.
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