Amazon, which had already invested $4 billion in Anthropic, the AI startup behind the Claude AI assistant, is doubling down. The e-commerce giant nevertheless demanded in return a more intense partnership and preview access for its customers to the innovations of the young start-up main competitor of OpenAI.
With training of frontier models now costing more than $100 million in computing resources, Anthropic is, like OpenAI, looking for technical and financial partners to enable it to survive and innovate.
Founded in 2021 by OpenAI alumni, Anthropic is its main competitor with Google. Its Claude IA assistant and its models Claude Haiku, Claude Sonnet and Claude Opus are among the models most appreciated by users and best rated in AI benchmarks.
Since its inception, the company has received various financings, one of the most notable of which was from Alphabet/Google for a starting amount of $500 million with a commitment of an additional $1.5 billion to follow. future. No one knows if this additional investment was made.
Because, in the meantime, Anthropic has found another important partner. In September 2023, Amazon announced investing $1.25 billion in the startup. Last March, Amazon injected an additional $2.75 billion (its largest external investment to date) to become a preferred partner.
For $4 billion more
This week, the two entities further strengthened their ties. Amazon will invest an additional $4 billion in Anthropic, but this time has demanded to be a little more than a “Gold” partner. While remaining a minority in the shares of the young company (despite a total investment of 8 billion), Amazon AWS not only becomes its preferred partner for training models, but will also benefit from early access to innovations from Anthropic. Starting with the possibility now for AWS business customers to access “fine-tuning” features of Claude models with their own data.
Anthropic will also optimize its models and algorithms to take advantage of AWS’s Trainium and Inferentia accelerators. The young company should even have an influence on the next developments of these accelerator chips to enable it to produce more efficient AI but above all more resource-efficient and less expensive. Because in 2024 the AI war has also become an inference price war.
For Amazon, which has not really succeeded in imposing its own Q models, but whose Bedrock API (which unifies calls to a multitude of third-party models) is very popular with developers, this partnership allows it to stay in the race and to present itself as a major player against Google and its Gemini models and against Microsoft Azure and its OpenAI partnership.
This gigantic investment by the e-commerce leader in Anthropic once again highlights the billions of dollars injected this year into AI startups. As a reminder, OpenAI raised $6.6 billion last October. xAI, Elon Musk’s AI startup, raised $6 billion last May. For its part, the very European startup Mistral AI announced last June a new fundraising of 600 million euros.
Also read:
OpenAI announces an XXL fundraising… to shape the future of humanity?
Lots of new features for Claude AI, ChatGPT’s competitor
GitHub Copilot becomes multi-model by adopting Claude and Gemini!
Anthropic launches Claude AI in enterprise version
[MAJ] OpenAI considers the “Orion” rumor to be Fake News!
Anthropic launches Claude 3.5 announced better than GPT-4o
