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E-commerce giant Amazon yesterday said it will invest up to US$4 billion in artificial intelligence firm Anthropic and take a minority ownership position in the company.
The move underscores Amazon’s aggressive AI push as it looks to keep pace with rivals such as Microsoft and Alphabet’s Google.
Anthropic was founded roughly two years ago by former OpenAI research executives and recently debuted its new AI chatbot called Claude 2.
Amazon is looking to capitalise on the hype and promise of so-called generative AI, which includes technology like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, as well as Anthropic’s Claude chatbots.
The two firms yesterday said that they are forming a strategic collaboration to advance generative AI, with the startup selecting Amazon Web Services as its primary cloud provider. Anthropic said it will provide AWS customers with early access to unique features for model customization and fine-tuning capabilities.
Anthropic will also use custom AWS-designed semiconductors to train the foundational models that underpin its AI applications. Foundation models are large AI programs trained on vast amounts of data so that they can be adapted to solve a wide range of tasks.
This year, chip firm Nvidia is the chip firm that has seen the biggest gains from the generative AI boom. Nvidia’s key product is a type of semiconductor known as a graphics processing unit, which can be used to train huge AI models. At one point Nvidia’s stock had rallied more than 200 percent, as the company smashed through financial forecasts on the rising adoption of AI.
To an extent, Amazon’s deal with Anthropic aims to show that there are alternative chips that can be used for AI applications. — CNBC.
Online Reporter