Within the newly announced collaboration, Amazon will invest as much as $4 billion into Anthropic, with AWS becoming Anthropic’s primary cloud provider for mission-critical workloads.
American e-commerce giant Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ: AMZN) has announced a strategic partnership with San Fransisco-based AI safety and research startup Anthropic. Within the deal, Amazon and Anthropic will work on developing advanced generative AI models that are safer, better-performing, and more reliable.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) Trainium and Inferentia chips will be employed by Anthropic to train and deploy its AI models. In addition, AWS will serve as a primary cloud provider for mission-critical workloads, including safety research and future foundation model development.
Meanwhile, for Amazon developers and engineers, the deal will open access to Anthropic models and use them to incorporate generative AI capabilities into their work via Amazon Bedrock.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy commented:
“We have tremendous respect for Anthropic’s team and foundation models and believe we can help improve many customer experiences, short and long-term, through our deeper collaboration. Customers are quite excited about Amazon Bedrock, AWS’s new managed service that enables companies to use various foundation models to build generative AI applications on top of, as well as AWS Trainium, AWS’s AI training chip, and our collaboration with Anthropic should help customers get even more value from these two capabilities.”
In addition, Amazon will invest as much as $4 billion in Anthropic. The initial investment of $1.25 billion will be made to receive a minority stake in the AI startup.
Amazon and Anthropic’s Collaboration History
Notably, Anthropic has been a customer of AWS for a while. In April this year, Amazon introduced its Amazon Bedrock service that provides developers and businesses with secure, seamless, and scalable access to cutting-edge models from a range of leading companies.
Bedrock provides access to Stability AI’s text-to-image models, including Stable Diffusion, multilingual LLMs from AI21 Labs, and Anthropic’s multilingual LLMs, called Claude and Claude Instant, which excel at conversational and text-processing tasks. Initially, its goal was to take on Google and OpenAI. With Bedrock, Amazon Web Services users were promised to be able to build out generative AI from foundation models (FMs).
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei stated:
“Since announcing our support of Amazon Bedrock in April, Claude has seen significant organic adoption from AWS customers. By significantly expanding our partnership, we can unlock new possibilities for organizations of all sizes, as they deploy Anthropic’s safe, state-of-the-art AI systems together with AWS’s leading cloud technology.”
Among the companies that have been already building Anthropic models on Amazon Bedrock are LexisNexis Legal & Professional – a leading global provider of legal, regulatory, and business information and analytics, Bridgewater Associates –a global leader in institutional portfolio management, and Lonely Planet – the leading travel guide brand.
Both Amazon and Anthropic are focusing on making generative AI safe and reliable. With this in mind, both companies have been promoting the responsible development and deployment of AI technologies.
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