Amazon Injects an Additional $2.75B Vote of Confidence in Anthropic
Anthropic’s Claude family of large language models (LLMs) have consistently featured among the best in the business, not that there is a significant competitive threat bar OpenAI’s GPT models and possibly Google’s Gemini, and Amazon now owns a minority stake in it with an investment of $4 billion.
- Amazon upped its investment in Anthropic to $4 billion, the maximum it could make under a deal it signed with the AI development company in September 2023.
- The cloud major holds a minority stake in the San Francisco-based Anthropic.
Amazon has poured $2.75 billion into Anthropic, a company that is possibly the closest to OpenAI in the generative AI race. The investment is in addition to the $1.25 billion the cloud and ecommerce giant made in the AI company in September 2023, which can be perceived as a vote of confidence in its tech.
Amazon fulfilled the $4 billion commitment made last year, its biggest venture investment, days before the first quarter deadline. The investment, while significantly lower than Microsoft’s $13 billion funding of OpenAI, indicates Amazon’s positive outlook on Anthropic, a company founded by former OpenAI VPs in February 2021.
Anthropic’s Claude family of large language models (LLMs) have consistently featured among the best in the business, not that there is a significant competitive threat bar OpenAI’s GPT models and possibly Google’s Gemini.
The company’s most recent claim to be THE best, not just among the best, came earlier in March 2024 with the launch of Claude 3 models. Anthropic said Claude 3 Opus outperforms GPT-4 Turbo.
See More: Is Microsoft Too Big To Fail in AI?
However, quantifying LLM outputs is debatable, which is why developers rely on crowdsourced data. This is why Claude 3 Opus deposing GPT-4 Turbo on the Chatbot Arena Leaderboard, a crowdsourced LLM evaluation platform, to clinch the #1 spot on March 26 was a landmark moment in the AI race.
Claude is now the top Centrally Controlled AI model. GPT-4’s long reign has come to an end, as the latest results from one of the biggest benchmarks in AI have placed Anthropic’s Claude 3 Opus at the top of its ranking.
This will change with a secret newly named ChatGPT-5. pic.twitter.com/0fSm2xwOp2
— Brian Roemmele (@BrianRoemmele) March 27, 2024
And Amazon now owns a minority stake in it alongside Google, which invested $2 billion in October 2023 and a $300 million corporate round investment in February 2023.
The deal encompasses Anthorpic making Amazon Web Services (AWS) its primary cloud service provider for AI model development, including the AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips for training and deploying models. Anthorpic’s Claude 3 family of models are also available through Amazon Bedrock.
While smaller AI companies have much to gain from Big Tech companies, be it financial or distribution-related, the latter’s investments indicate their reliance on specialized companies to develop AI for them. Case in point: Microsoft’s investment in Inflection AI, Mistral AI, and, of course, OpenAI; Amazon’s investment in Anthorpic; Google taking over DeepMind way before it was cool; and Apple acquiring DarwinAI.
As of December 2023, Anthorpic was worth over $18 billion after raising approximately $7 billion last year and $7.6 billion in total.
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