Amazon.com Inc's (NASDAQ:AMZN) $4 billion acquisition of a minority stake in the artificial intelligence (AI) firm Anthropic is a telling sign of the ecommerce giant’s AI ambitions.
Anthropic, founded around two years ago by former OpenAI research executives, recently unveiled an AI chatbot called Claude 2 which is aimed at rivaling ChatGPT.
In Amazon, Anthropic gets a potential boon for training its AI models. Amazon Web Services will serve as Anthropic’s main cloud platform as part of the investment.
In turn, AWS clients will also be able to access Anthropic’s features to customize their own AI models, essentially baking generative AI into its cloud offerings.
Anthropic will also get access to custom AWS-designed semiconductors for training its foundational AI models, using the technology to serve as the bedrock for various AI applications and to help with the adaptability for a wide range of tasks.
The chips, designed to push Nvidia’s grip on the sector, also speak to Amazon’s long-term AI ambition.
Nvidia, known for its graphics processing units used in training large AI models, has seen significant gains due to the surge in generative AI technologies and OpenAI has received billions in funding from giants like Microsoft following the release of its chatbot.
Last week, Amazon unveiled a “smarter and more conversational” version of its Alexa virtual assistant powered by generative AI at the company’s annual device event.
The new Alexa is meant to have a more human-like voice and carry on more natural conversations, even without being prompted with a command word. With generative AI, it is also supposed to be capable of learning about its users with each interaction.
Contact Andrew Kessel at andrew.kessel@proactiveinvestors.com
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