Amazon completes $4 billion investment in generative AI developer
Amazon is making its largest-ever venture capital investment into a provider of next-generation artificial intelligence (AI) technology.
The e-tail giant, which entered into a strategic collaboration with San Francisco-based generative AI developer Anthropic in September 2023, is completing a $4 billion investment into the company with a $2.75 billion round of funding that follows an initial $1.25 billion investment made when the partnership was first announced.
This marks Amazon's biggest venture capital commitment to date into any type of company. Anthropic’s generative AI foundation model, Claude, is a competitor with ChatGPT, a generative AI model developed by OpenAI which interacts with users in a conversational style that mimics human interaction and uses machine learning (ML) to continually refine and improve its responses.
As part of the deal, Anthropic will use Amazon Web Services (AWS) Trainium and Inferentia chips to build, train, and deploy its future foundation models. The two companies will also collaborate in the development of future Trainium and Inferentia technology.
Antrhopic integrates with Amazon Bedrock
Anthropic is also making a long-term commitment to provide global AWS customers with access to future generations of its foundation models via Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed generative AI service from AWS. In addition, Anthropic will provide AWS customers with early access to features for generative AI model customization and fine-tuning capabilities.
Furthermore, Amazon developers and engineers will be able to build with Anthropic models via Amazon Bedrock. Users of Amazon's AI platform will soon be able to access the Claude 3 assortment of vision-enabled models — Claude 3 Opus, Claude 3 Sonnet, and Claude 3 Haiku — on Amazon Bedrock, with Claude 3 Sonnet available now.
In addition to models from Anthropic, Amazon Bedrock’s range of generative AI models includes those from AI21 Labs, Cohere, Meta, Mistral AI, Stability AI and Amazon.
According to Anthropic, Claude 3 offers improvements over other current generative AI models across tasks such as coding, and being able to understand non-English languages (including Spanish, Japanese and French), as well as lower levels of hallucinations (incorrect results), and higher levels of accuracy.
Claude 3 models can also produce outputs in formats that Anthropic says make it easier for customers to develop applications for use cases like natural language classification and sentiment analysis.
All three new models have advanced vision capabilities, enabling them to process diverse data formats and analyze image data to better understand charts, graphs, technical diagrams, photos, and other visual assets.
"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," said Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian, VP of data and AI at Amazon Web Services (AWS), in a corporate blog post.
"Anthropic’s visionary work with generative AI, most recently the introduction of its state-of-the art Claude 3 family of models, combined with Amazon’s best-in-class infrastructure like AWS Tranium and managed services like Amazon Bedrock, further unlocks exciting opportunities for customers to quickly, securely, and responsibly innovate with generative AI," said Sivasubramanian. "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."