Amazon + Anthropic: A $4 Billion Deal to Advance Generative AI

Amazon, the e-commerce giant, has announced a strategic collaboration with Anthropic, a leading AI startup, to advance generative AI and make it safer and more accessible. The deal involves an investment of up to $4 billion in cash from Amazon for a minority stake in Anthropic, as well as a deep integration of their respective technologies and expertise.

Anthropic is a research and engineering company that aims to create foundation models that are aligned with human values and can be steered and interpreted by humans. Foundation models are large-scale neural networks that can learn from massive amounts of data and perform a variety of tasks across domains, such as natural language processing, computer vision, and speech recognition. Examples of foundation models include GPT-3, CLIP, and DALL-E.

However, foundation models also pose significant challenges and risks, such as bias, misuse, and unpredictability. Anthropic’s mission is to address these issues by developing safety techniques and tools that can ensure the reliability and trustworthiness of foundation models. Anthropic’s products include Claude, a state-of-the-art natural language foundation model that can generate coherent and accurate texts for various purposes, such as dialogue, summarization, and content creation. Claude also features a 100,000 token context window, which allows it to process extensive amounts of information and handle complex reasoning and instruction.

As part of the collaboration, Anthropic will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to build, train, and deploy its future foundation models. AWS Trainium and Inferentia are custom-designed machine learning accelerators that offer high performance and low cost for AI workloads. The two companies will also collaborate in the development of future Trainium and Inferentia technology.

AWS will become Anthropic’s primary cloud provider for mission critical workloads, including safety research and future foundation model development. Anthropic plans to run the majority of its workloads on AWS, taking advantage of the scale, security, and innovation of the world’s leading cloud provider.

Anthropic also makes a long-term commitment to provide AWS customers around the world with access to future generations of its foundation models via Amazon Bedrock, AWS’s fully managed service that provides secure access to the industry’s top foundation models. In addition, Anthropic will provide AWS customers with early access to unique features for model customization and fine-tuning capabilities. This will enable enterprises to optimize Claude’s performance with their expert knowledge, while limiting the potential for harmful outcomes.

Amazon developers and engineers will be able to build with Anthropic models via Amazon Bedrock so they can incorporate generative AI capabilities into their work, enhance existing applications, and create net-new customer experiences across Amazon’s businesses.

Organizations across many industries are already building with Anthropic models on Amazon Bedrock. For example:

• LexisNexis Legal & Professional, a leading global provider of information and analytics, is using a custom, fine-tuned Claude model to deliver conversational search, insightful summarization, and intelligent legal drafting capabilities via the company’s new Lexis+ AI solution.
• Bridgewater Associates, a premier asset management firm, is developing an investment analyst assistant powered by Claude to generate elaborate charts, compute financial indicators, and create summaries of the results.
• Lonely Planet, a renowned travel publisher, reduced its itinerary generation costs by almost 80 percent after deploying Claude; synthesizing its decades of travel content to deliver cohesive, highly accurate travel recommendations.

Anthropic and Amazon are both committed to the safe training and deployment of advanced foundation models. Amazon is an industry leader in cloud security and, as part of this agreement, is committed to promoting and implementing safety best practices on Amazon Bedrock to ensure the responsible use of their products and services.

The deal between Amazon and Anthropic shows the growing importance and potential of generative AI in various domains and applications. It also reflects the increasing competition among big tech companies to attract AI talent and customers. By partnering with Anthropic, Amazon hopes to gain an edge over its rivals such as Microsoft, Google, and Nvidia in the AI industry.