Amazon has pledged up to $4 billion (拢3.3bn) in funding for a rival to OpenAI鈥檚 ChatGPT.
Artificial intelligence firm Anthropic, based in San Francisco and London, has created a large language model chatbot named Claude, the second iteration of which launched recently.
Amazon鈥檚 initial investment is 拢1bn. It follows Microsoft鈥檚 multi-million-dollar backing for OpenAI, announced in January, and the news in June that Microsoft and Nvidia had led a $1.3bn round into Inflection AI.
The deal will see Anthropic use Amazon Web Services as its primary cloud provider for the 鈥渕ajority of workloads鈥� and also use AWS-designed Trainium and Inferentia chips – looking to rival market leader Nvidia – in its foundation models.
Customers using AWS will gain early access to unique features for 鈥渕odel customisation and fine-tuning capabilities鈥�.
鈥淲e have tremendous respect for Anthropic鈥檚 team and foundation models, and believe we can help improve many customer experiences, short- and long-term, through our deeper collaboration,鈥� said Amazon CEO Andy Jassy.
ChatGPT, the first LLM to crack the mass market, only launched late last year. However, the race to lead the next generation of AI is already moving beyond the early stage of these generative AI models.
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Amazon will soon use AI to accelerate the conversational powers of its voice assistant Alexa, while ChatGPT – which currently generates text and code in response to typed commands – is to enable voice interactions and incorporate images.
Anthropic CEO and co-founder Dario Amodei added: 鈥淏y significantly expanding our partnership, we can unlock new possibilities for organisations of all sizes, as they deploy Anthropic鈥檚 safe, state-of-the-art AI systems together with AWS鈥檚 leading cloud technology.鈥�