Amazon.com Inc. says it is investing an additional $2.75 billion in Anthropic, complementing a deal it signed last year to support artificial intelligence startups and expand partnerships between the companies. This investment brings Amazon’s total investment in Anthropic, a well-known maker of AI tools capable of generating text and analysis, to $4 billion, following an investment previously announced in September. As part of that deal, Amazon had the right to contribute additional funds in the form of convertible notes, provided it did so before the end of March.
As part of the tie-up, Anthropic has also agreed to use Amazon Web Services data centers and use Amazon’s custom-built computer chips to power some of its operations. San Francisco-based Anthropic has also committed to using chips from Google, another close partner, Alphabet Inc.
Anthropic has struck deals with several big tech companies, including Google, which participated in a $450 million funding round led by Spark Capital last May. Both Google and Amazon Web Services are cloud computing partners of Anthropic.
Anthropic was formed in 2021 by former OpenAI employees, including Daniela Amodei and her brother Dario, who serves as its chief executive officer. The company has since become one of OpenAI’s strongest competitors, raising billions in funding. Most of its customers are businesses, ranging from search engine DuckDuckGo to travel guide publisher Lonely Planet.
The company, which provides a chatbot called Cloud, has placed an emphasis on developing AI safely and responsibly. In early March, it introduced new software for chatbots that it said would be better able to carry out complex instructions and less likely to make things up.
Chatbots capable of mimicking human conversations have become a growing focus of Silicon Valley companies – with rapid technological advancements fueling an investment frenzy. Chatbots themselves are not new by any means. But the technology powering the cloud and competitors’ bots is a more powerful tool known as a large language model, which is trained on large swaths of the Internet to generate text, such as a question or a poem. Answer of. Such tools are an application of generative AI, systems that treat input as a text prompt and use it to output new content.
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