Amazon invests $2.75 billion in Anthropic

Amazon announced a whopping $2.75 billion investment in AI startup Anthropic.

Anthropic’s Claude 3 Opus is officially probably the most powerful LLM on the planet, narrowly surpassing the heavyweight GPT-4 LMSys leaderboard.

Anthropic has raised billions in funding from quite a few sources, including Amazon and Google, and has turn into OpenAI’s major competitor.

Amazon is now shoveling coal into Anthropic with a brand new influx of funds, adding to the corporate’s previous investment of $1.25 billion. This brings the overall commitment to an incredible $4 billion. This deal, whose value is predicated on Anthropic’s latest valuation of $18.4 billion, is one in every of the largest bets of the 12 months.

Swami Sivasubramanian, Amazon’s vp of knowledge and AI, said concerning the partnership: “Generative AI is heading in the right direction to turn into probably the most transformative technology of our time, and we consider our strategic collaboration with Anthropic will further enhance our customers’ experiences and look ahead to the long run.”

Amazon’s move to speculate in Anthropic comes at an opportune time after Microsoft pulled off a serious coup by acquiring former DeepMind worker Mustafa Suleyman from Inflection to steer its CoPilot team. Microsoft later paid $620 million for the rights to sell access to Inflection’s Pi models through its Azure cloud.

Amazon will retain a minority stake in Anthropic with out a seat on the board, suggesting a partnership to drive innovation while allowing the corporate to keep up its strategic autonomy.

This is crucial because Anthropic has created a special area of interest in AI research with its give attention to “constitutional AI.”

Amazon’s willingness to let Anthropic maintain its creative direction is reassuring. It is questionable whether Microsoft OpenAI offers this possibility.

Attention from regulators

Big Tech’s tactics to shut down smaller AI players haven’t gone unnoticed by regulators.

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), led by Chairwoman Lina Khan, known for her ruthless pursuit of technology deals, announced a market investigation into the investments and partnerships between AI developers and major cloud service providers.

In November 2023, announced the FTC It would expand its Civil Investigative Demands (CID) for AI corporations. Khan said on the time: “There is loads of uncertainty about what the long run of this technology will appear to be.” “But the FTC has made it clear that there is no such thing as a exception to the (antitrust) laws.”

The FTC questioned OpenAI about this Business with Microsoft and warned Reddit about it licensing of your data its recent IPO.

Each acquisition or investment seeks to seize or maintain dominance within the rapidly evolving AI space, where alliances are each complex and significant to success.