Amazon will invest up to $4 billion (£3.3 billion) in San Francisco-based artificial intelligence company Anthropic, mirroring the previous alliance between Microsoft and OpenAI.
This is the latest multimillion-dollar investment in the race by major technology companies to realize the potential of artificial intelligence.
Amazon recently announced that it would use AI to boost the conversational performance of its Alexa voice assistant.
Anthropic has its own ChatGPT rival named Claude.
Amazon said the investment could help improve customer experience.
“If you look at the world of generative AI, this is the beginning of the race,” Jim Hare of research firm Gartner told BBC News.
While Microsoft initially benefited most from the AI craze through its partnership with OpenAI, others were said to be catching up.
“Now we're starting to see other cloud providers investing more in generative AI and putting out their own ads and their own products, and I think the playing field is starting to level out. In other words, it’s no longer Microsoft – just show OpenAI,” he said.
Anthropic, an AI research and security company, was founded in 2021 and is one of several AI startups that have emerged recently to compete with the likes of Google DeepMind and OpenAI.
In addition to online trading, Amazon is an important provider of so-called cloud computing services. Put simply, it rents computing power – housed in huge warehouses full of computers, called data centers – to other companies to help them store or process their data.
By working together, Anthropic can benefit from this enormous computing power.
In return, Amazon developers can use Claude 2, the latest version of Anthropic's foundational AI model, to create new applications for their customers and improve existing ones.
Microsoft, which runs a cloud computing company called Azure, has a similar agreement with OpenAI.
And days after Amazon announced its planned AI-powered Alexa update, OpenAI revealed on Monday that chatGPT users would be able to ask it questions by speaking to it and posting images that could be referenced in conversations.
Partnering with the ChatGPT maker allowed Microsoft to announce a number of new AI-powered features for existing products, including its intelligent assistant for Microsoft 365, Copilot, which will begin rolling out on Tuesday.
The Anthropic deal was another symbol of tech giants like Amazon and Google seeking to challenge Nvidia's dominance in the lucrative market for specialized AI chips, according to Nick Patience, senior AI analyst at S&P Global Market Intelligence.
However, it is less certain that large technology companies with significant cloud computing power and budgets will be the kings of the AI sector, he told the BBC.
Anthropic said Amazon would take a minority stake in the company. To develop its new AI models, Amazon's Trainium and Inferentia chips are used, which were specifically developed for generative AI applications.
Anthropic said it believes in the responsible development and use of AI. Both companies have independently supported a number of voluntary security commitments from the White House, he said.
Dario Amodei, CEO of
Anthropic, met with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and the heads of DeepMind and OpenAI in May to discuss the potential risks of AI (from misinformation to national security to “existential threats”) and the Coping with necessary voluntary measures and regulations to discuss with them.
The British government, which will host a global AI summit at the modern Bletchley Park computer center in southeast England in November, said the arrival of AI was a "crossroads" in the history of computing.
announced Monday that the summit would focus primarily on futuristic "frontier AI," referring to high-performance AI models that can perform a variety of tasks better than today's most advanced models.
In particular, the summit would analyze the risk of misuse of AI, for example to assist in biological or cyber attacks.
“The focus on this type of AI is driven by the urgent need to talk about how nations can work together to address the new challenges posed by these risks, combat the misuse of models and harness AI, "to achieve real public and tangible good in the world - from curing disease to improving education," the government said.
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