On September 25, 2023, Amazon announced that it would invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic, an artificial intelligence (AI) startup. This is one of the largest investments ever made in an AI company by Amazon, and it signals Amazon’s serious intent to become a leader in the AI field.
What is Anthropic?
Anthropic is a research and development company that is working to develop safe and beneficial artificial general intelligence (AGI). Anthropic’s most popular product is Claude AI competitor for ChatGPT & Bard.
Reasons Amazon Might Have Chosen Anthropic
As of now, amazon has not officially specified the reasons for choosing the anthropic for investment in the AI. Mentioned are the several reasons
- Through this collaboration, Anthropic will become one of AWS’s largest cloud customers, which might lead to an increase in the number of high-value AI clients using Amazon’s cloud services.
- Anthropic’s computing requirements align well with those of AWS’s infrastructure.
- AWS’s AI performance can be enhanced by using Amazon Bedrock to gain access to Anthropic’s base models.
It’s important to note that Amazon’s investment in Anthropic doesn’t restrict the company from forming partnerships with or acquiring other AI businesses in the future.
Investors are pouring billions of dollars into generative AI startups
Other notable partnerships between tech giants and AI startups include:
- Google invested in Hugging Face, a startup that provides an open-source platform for building natural language processing applications, as part of its $235 million Series D funding round in August 2023. The round valued Hugging Face at $4.5 billion.
- Amazon acquired Zoox, a self-driving startup, for about $1.2 billion in June 20203. Zoox had been developing driverless cars with a view to rolling out an on-demand autonomous taxi service since 2014.
- Nvidia invested in Hugging Face as well as Provino, a startup that develops interconnect protocols for AI applications, in 2023. Nvidia also announced a collaboration with Hugging Face to develop generative AI models using Nvidia’s AI computing platform. The amounts of Nvidia’s investments were not disclosed.
- Microsoft acquired Nuance, a speech recognition and conversational AI leader, for $56 per share, or about $16 billion, in April 2021. Nuance’s technology was used to enhance Microsoft’s cloud and healthcare offerings.
- Alphabet’s investment in Parti AI in 2023
- Intel’s investment in Groq in 2023: $300 million
- Nvidia’s investment in DeepMind in 2023: Nvidia invested $400 million in DeepMind in 2023
These partnerships highlight the growing interest of tech giants in AI, and their desire to secure access to cutting-edge AI technologies.
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