Amazon announced on Monday an investment of up to $4 billion in American artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Anthropic, which is developing a competitor to ChatGPT, marking a new step in the global race for these technologies.
With this partnership, the e-commerce and cloud computing giant takes a minority stake in Anthropic, which developed Claude, a chatbot that competes with ChatGPT, the startup’s popular California-based AI tool OpenAI.
Just like the latter, Anthropic is one of the pioneers alongside the giants Google and Microsoft in the development of the latest generation of artificial intelligence.
The so-called “generative” AI allows the creation of original content based on a large amount of data. It provides an interface for the user to ask questions or make requests to receive text, music, images or code.
With this agreement, Amazon wants to penetrate this booming sector, which is whetting the appetite of Internet giants and investors.
When AI is closely watched by many companies, they rely on cloud computing giants – Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Google – to have the computing power necessary to use it.
Personal assistants
These groups therefore decided to collaborate with AI developers. Earlier this year, Microsoft extended its partnership with OpenAI through a multi-billion dollar agreement.
Anthropic has also already attracted interest, with Google investing $300 million to acquire 10% of the young Californian company earlier this year.
Amazon developers and engineers, thanks to Anthropic models, will be able to integrate artificial intelligence capabilities and create new experiences on the Internet for Amazon customers in all their activities, the company states in its press release.
For its part, Anthropic will use AWS chips specifically designed to create machine learning models and accelerate the development of future chatbot models.
Big tech companies are quickly implementing generative AI capabilities in their online software (Office, Code, Search, Email, etc.) to turn it into a kind of personal assistant.
A few days ago, Amazon announced that its virtual assistant Alexa would be equipped with AI. Microsoft, in turn, announced last Thursday that it would integrate OpenAI’s new generative artificial intelligence interface into its Bing search engine.
The race for AI is international. At the end of August, the Chinese internet giant Baidu launched its conversation robot Ernie Bot, which was initially only available on the Chinese market.