Amazon invests up to $4 billion in artificial intelligence startup Anthropic. With this, the commercial giant wants to increase its competitiveness in the fast-growing artificial intelligence sector with companies such as Microsoft, Meta, Google and Nvidia.
Amazon will initially invest $1.25 billion. The company has the option to increase its investment in Anthropic to a total of $4 billion. Like Google Bard and Microsoft’s OpenAI, Anthropic also operates an AI-powered text-analyzing chatbot.
Anthropic plans to raise up to $5 billion over the next two years. Anthropic launched its first consumer-facing chatbot, Claude 2, earlier this month and plans to build a new model, tentatively called “Claude-Next,” that is 10 times more capable than today’s most powerful AI.
Anthropic has found itself a good strategic investor in Amazon, who can also provide it with the computing power to build future AI models and then find and sell offerings to many cloud customers.
Anthropic, whose backers also include Spark Capital, Salesforce, Sound Ventures, Menlo Ventures and Zoom, has raised a total of $2.7 billion to date. In May of this year, the startup was valued at around $5 billion when it received $450 million in a funding round.
Source: TechCrunch
