Amazon expands its investment into Anthropic AI to $4 billion. This is the largest external investment by the company.
Amazon had earlier promised an investment of $1.25 billion into Anthropic AI, the creator of the Claude chatbot and LLM. Less than a week ago, Amazon announced another piece of investment. This time, it’s $2.75 billion. Notably, Claude’s heaviest weight recently took down GPT-4 as the leader of all LLMs.
Clearly, Amazon is going in big. OpenAI’s ChatGPT (and its GPT-4 model) has been the epitome of generative AI for a while now. It makes sense to invest in its competitor to create something even better and keep the competition going. Companies don’t really invest in the other competitor OpenAI has (Google and its Gemini), so Anthropic comes out as the obvious choice. Funnel money into competitors, reap bigger benefits, gain a larger slice of the market, and on and on.
In the official announcement, Amazon points out how generative AI is going to be the most transformational technology of our time. And to make corporate adoption faster, Amazon is funding Anthropic in a way unlike anything before.
The current idea seems to be to invest in generative AI chatbots that charge users for their premium models and reap benefits in a profit-sharing way. Microsoft is still doing that since it announced its own historic investment into OpenAI. Notably, Amazon is not going to get a major stake in the company with this. It won’t even hold a board seat. Turns out Amazon just wants to let them do what they want to do. Maybe their thoughts align already and need no steering, or maybe they just want to avoid something of the OpenAI-Microsoft fame.
In total, Anthropic is now worth $18.4 billion. The Amazon investment also gives Claude access to AWS cloud hosting as well as the custom chips being developed by Amazon.
