Amazon announced an additional $4 billion investment in artificial intelligence company Anthropic, the creator of the AI chatbot Claude. Thus, the total amount of funding reached $8 billion – Anthropic received $1.25 billion in September last year, and another $2.75 billion in March of this year.
Image source: anthropic.com
In addition to monetary funding, the Amazon Web Services cloud platform will become a “primary training partner” for Anthropic’s neural networks. It was also said that in the future, one of OpenAI’s main competitors will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia AI accelerators when training large language models.
The new investment and closer partnership between Amazon and Anthropic is consistent with recent media reports that Claude’s algorithm will power Amazon’s next-generation Alexa voice assistant. The updated Alexa, whose launch to the public was delayed, worked better with Claude than with Amazon’s own model, according to the source. Amazon is expected to officially introduce the next-generation Alexa assistant in 2025.
Despite the increased investment, Amazon risks falling further behind in the race to create cutting-edge AI algorithms, where OpenAI and Microsoft are among the leaders. The developers promise that the updated Alexa will speak more like a human, but users of the beta version of the assistant reported slow responsiveness, unnatural and unhelpful answers to questions asked.