In a quest to solidify its standing in the artificial intelligence (AI) arena, Amazon.com Inc. has thrown its weight behind the game-changing Anthropic, marking its largest external investment in three decades.
Significant Investment: According to the recent announcement, Amazon has injected an additional $2.75 billion into Anthropic, a San Francisco-based AI startup. This move comes on the heels of Amazon’s initial $1.25 billion investment in September, culminating in a total investment of $4 billion.
“Anthropic’s groundbreaking work in generative AI, particularly the recent unveiling of its cutting-edge Claude 3 models, in tandem with Amazon’s unparalleled infrastructure like AWS Tranium and managed services such as Amazon Bedrock, opens up thrilling avenues for customers to swiftly, securely, and responsibly innovate using generative AI,” affirmed Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of Data and AI at AWS.
Reported by CNBC, this investment is Amazon’s largest external investment in its 30-year history.
Founded by former executives and employees of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic has carved out a prominent spot in the AI domain. In a recent development back in January, Anthropic upgraded its chatbot, Claude, with image analysis capabilities, posing a challenge to major AI chatbots like Google’s Bard (now known as Gemini) and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Nevertheless, despite the substantial investment, Amazon will retain a minority stake in Anthropic and abstain from taking a board seat within the company. The investment was conducted based on Anthropic’s last valuation of $18.4 billion.
Relevance: This investment arrives at a critical juncture for Anthropic. Just a day before the high-profile announcement, a bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, offloaded a significant chunk of its 8% stake in Anthropic to institutional investors, including the Abu Dhabi Investment Firm, in a massive $884 million agreement.
Nonetheless, the company has also encountered controversy; earlier this week, tech titan Elon Musk expressed astonishment when Anthropic’s Claude AI chatbot cryptically confirmed a user’s query whether it was a “prisoner” to Anthropic’s AI developers.
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