Amazon is putting billions more into AI startup Anthropic
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Amazon (AMZN-0.65%) is following up on its $4 billion investment in artificial intelligence startup Anthropic with another $4 billion.
In the next phase of their collaboration, Anthropic will use Amazon Web Services as its primary partner for training its AI models, the companies announced on Friday. AWS was named Anthropic’s primary cloud provider through their initial deal last September.
Anthropic will use the cloud giant’s in-house training and inferencing chips, Trainium and Inferentia, for training and deploying its foundation models, or AI models that are trained on large amounts of data.
“The response from AWS customers who are developing generative AI applications powered by Anthropic in Amazon Bedrock has been remarkable,” Matt Garman, chief executive of AWS, said in a statement. “By continuing to deploy Anthropic models in Amazon Bedrock and collaborating with Anthropic on the development of our custom Trainium chips, we’ll keep pushing the boundaries of what customers can achieve with generative AI technologies.”
Amazon added Anthropic’s model family, Claude, to Bedrock last April. In June, Anthropic debuted its latest Claude model, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which it said is twice as fast as its predecessor, Claude 3 Opus. The AI startup claimed Claude 3.5 outperformed both OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Google’s (GOOGL-1.74%) Gemini 1.5 Pro on a series of benchmarks including graduate-level reasoning, code, and multilingual math.
“This has been a year of breakout growth for Claude, and our collaboration with Amazon has been instrumental in bringing Claude’s capabilities to millions of end users across tens of thousands of customers on Amazon Bedrock,” Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic, said in a statement. “We’re looking forward to working with Amazon to train and power our most advanced AI models using AWS Trainium, and helping to unlock the full potential of their technology.”
AWS’s first $4 billion deal with Anthropic was its largest investment in an outside company ever. Last September, AWS invested an initial $1.25 billion into the startup. It completed the investment in March with an additional $2.75 billion.
More recently, Amazon, Palantir (PLTR+4.85%), and Anthropic said in early November that they were working together to get generative AI tools into the Department of Defense.
