Amazon has made a $4 billion investment in Anthropic, a rival artificial intelligence (AI) startup to ChatGPT, establishing its minority ownership in the company. The e-commerce and technology giant revealed that it has injected an additional $2.75 billion into Anthropic, following its initial investment of $1.25 billion in September. Anthropic, founded in 2021 by former members of OpenAI, has emerged as a strong competitor to ChatGPT with its own AI chatbot called Claude. The company recently introduced Claude 3, its most advanced version that can analyze images in addition to its chat capabilities.
As part of the investment deal, Amazon announced that Anthropic has selected Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its primary cloud provider for critical workloads, including safety research and future model development. Anthropic will utilize AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to build, train, and deploy its upcoming models. Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President of Data and AI at AWS, stated that they have a significant history with Anthropic, working together to help organizations of all sizes deploy advanced generative AI applications. He described generative AI as “the most transformational technology of our time.”
In addition to its substantial investments in AI, Amazon recently launched its own AI-powered assistant called Amazon Q, specifically designed for businesses. Amazon Q offers chatbot capabilities, problem-solving abilities, content creation, and more. While ChatGPT currently dominates the AI space in terms of popularity, Amazon’s investment in Anthropic is not the only one from tech giants interested in the promising AI startup. In October of last year, Google announced a $500 million investment in Anthropic, with plans to increase it to $2 billion.
However, like many prominent AI chatbot developers, Anthropic has faced legal disputes related to copyright and data infringement. The company has been involved in a lawsuit filed by music label Universal Music Group (UMG) in January. UMG accused Anthropic of “unlawful” use, copying, and dissemination of copyrighted works from their catalog during AI training. Despite these challenges, Anthropic continues to attract significant investments and partnerships from industry leaders.
In other AI-related news, Ethereum Network has achieved one million validators, securing $114 billion in staked Ether. Additionally, three major AI blockchain firms, SingularityNET, Fetch.ai, and Ocean Protocol, are planning a merger of their crypto tokens to establish a decentralized AI platform and foster collaboration among the three companies. The proposed merger is subject to approval from the respective communities, and an official announcement could be expected soon. However, some experts express skepticism about the value potential of AI tokens, suggesting that the current market hype may outweigh their actual utility in the short to medium term.
