E-commerce and cloud computing giant Amazon said it will invest up to $4 billion into San Francisco generative AI juggernaut Anthropic, taking a minority ownership in the company and setting up a battle of titans between Microsoft-backed OpenAI.
Anthropic was founded by OpenAI alums Dario and Daniela Amodei and is the creator of a generative AI chatbot Claude, which the company has striven to portray as a safer alternative to other AI products.
Earlier this year Microsoft announced it would invest $10 billion in OpenAI, just months after the company released its ChatGPT interface that stunned the world with its fluent responses to prompts.
In a statement, Amazon said Anthropic will use its AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to “to build, train, and deploy its future foundation models,” industry speak for bots like Claude that can chew over different data sets to spit out answers, but which are hugely time and resource intensive to build and train.
Computer chips fast enough to process the vast amounts of data needed to train AI models have also become a battleground, with companies racing to design and implement larger and faster products.
Anthropic will also use Amazon’s AWS as its main cloud provider, including for safety research and future foundation model development, Amazon said.
“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,” Amodei said in a statement.
Last month the Chronicle reported the AI company would lease the 230,000-square-foot space that was formerly Slack’s headquarters at 500 Howard St.
Google, which has its own AI technology it calls Bard, previously invested $300 million in Anthropic in May, the Wall Street Journal reported.
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