Amazon Invests $4 Billion in Anthropic
Like Microsoft and OpenAI, Amazon will spend up to $4 billion (£3.3 billion) in San Francisco-based Anthropic, an AI company.
This multi-billion dollar expenditure is the most recent in a race among the largest tech companies to fully utilize the potential of artificial intelligence.
Amazon recently announced that it would use AI to improve the conversational capabilities of its Alexa voice assistant.
The ChatGPT competitor for Anthropic is Claude.
Amazon asserted that the investment might enhance customer experiences.
“If you look at the world of generative AI, this is the beginning of the race,” Jim Hare of the research firm Gartner told BBC News.
Despite the fact that Microsoft’s cooperation with OpenAI allowed it to initially benefit the most from the interest in AI, he claimed that others were catching up.
“Now that the other cloud providers are beginning to invest more in generative AI, they are developing their own announcements and products, and I believe that the playing field is beginning to level off. To put it another way, it’s not just a Microsoft-OpenAI show anymore, he said.
One of the many AI start-ups that have lately appeared to compete with companies like Google DeepMind and OpenAI is Anthropic, an organization that focuses on AI safety and research. Anthropic was founded in 2021.
Amazon is a significant supplier of so-called cloud computing services in addition to online retail. Simply simply, it leases computing capacity to other businesses to help store or process their data. This processing power is kept in enormous warehouses full of computers called data centers.
Due to the collaboration, Anthropic will have access to this enormous processing capacity.
Claude 2, the most recent iteration of Anthropic’s core AI model, will in turn be used by Amazon developers to build new applications for its users and improve already-existing ones.
A similar agreement exists between OpenAI and Microsoft, which runs a cloud computing company named Azure.
Additionally, OpenAI disclosed on Monday that users of chatGPT would be able to ask it questions by speaking to it and share photos that could be referenced in chats, days after Amazon unveiled the planned AI-powered upgrade to Alexa.
Microsoft has announced a variety of new AI-powered features for its existing products thanks to its cooperation with the creator of ChatGPT, including Copilot, an intelligent assistant for Microsoft 365 that will begin to be released on Tuesday.
According to Nick Patience, the lead AI analyst at S&P Global Market Intelligence, the agreement with Anthropic was just another sign that IT behemoths like Amazon and Google were vying with Nvidia for supremacy in the lucrative market for specialized AI processors.
Less certain, he told the BBC, is whether major tech companies will control the AI market given their access to large amounts of cloud computing power and funding.
According to Anthropic, Amazon would acquire a small share in the company. It will create its new AI models using Amazon’s Trainium and Inferentia processors, which are made exclusively for generative AI applications.
Anthropic stated that it supported the ethical development and application of AI. Both businesses, according to the statement, voluntarily backed a set of safety promises coordinated by the White House.
Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, met with UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, the heads of DeepMind, and OpenAI in May to discuss the potential risks from AI, including “existential threats” and disinformation as well as the voluntary actions and regulations needed to manage them.
The UK government has stated that the emergence of AI offers a “crossroads” in human history. In November, Bletchley Park, the birthplace of modern computing, will play host to a global summit on AI.
It was revealed on Monday that the summit would focus mostly on “frontier AI”—a term used to describe extremely proficient AI models that are capable of carrying out a variety of tasks better than the most sophisticated models available today.
The summit would focus in particular on the danger of AI being abused, perhaps to support biological or cyberattacks.
The government stated that there is a “urgent need for conversation on how nations can work together to meet the novel challenges these risks pose, combat misuse of models, and use AI to do real, tangible public good across the world—from curing disease to improving education.”
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