Amazon invests $4 billion Anthropic AI startup

Amazon and artificial intelligence (AI) startup Anthropic have announced a new investment agreement to aid the research and development of new high-performing foundation models. 

In a post on X, formerly Twitter, Anthropic revealed that Amazon has invested $4 billion in its work, while receiving access to Amazon cloud services (AWS) Trainium and Inferentia chips.

It said it will be offering in return “enhanced support” of Amazon Bedrock, which produces foundation models, with “secure model customization and fine-tuning” for businesses. Amazon teams will also be able to use Bedrock to build on Anthropic’s models.

Our agreement provides Anthropic with access to @awscloud Trainium and Inferentia chips. We’ll also offer enhanced support of Amazon Bedrock with secure model customization and fine-tuning for businesses.

— Anthropic (@AnthropicAI) September 25, 2023

Additionally, through the deal Amazon is reported to be taking a “minority stake” in Anthropic. The latter said this has caused no disruption in its governance. 

“As outlined in this policy, we will conduct pre-deployment tests of new models to help us manage the risks of increasingly capable AI systems.”

The AI startup was formed by former members of the Microsoft-backed OpenAI, the creator of the viral AI chatbot ChatGPT.

Related: Anthropic cracks open the black box to see how AI comes up with the stuff it says

This latest development comes shortly after Anthropic announced an investment of $100 million from the South Korean telecommunications giant SK Telecom back in August. 

That investment followed a collaboration between Anthropic and SK Telecom to develop a multilingual large language model (LLM) for the latter’s Telco AI Platform.

Anthropic has also recently been a part of major movements within the AI community. In July it joined Google, OpenAI, Microsoft and others in the formation of the “Frontier Model Forum,” which was created in order to self-regulate the development of from the inside.

It has also been a part of initiatives led by the United States government relating to AI development and regulation, including a cybersecurity challenge to help strengthen its “critical infrastructure.”

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