Anthropic raises an additional $4 billion from Amazon, making AWS its “primary” training partner.

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Anthropic, a close competitor of OpenAI, has He grew up An additional $4 billion from Amazon, and it agreed to make Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud computing division, the primary place where it will train its leading generative AI models.

Anthropic also says it is working with Annapurna Labs, the chipmaking division of AWS, to develop next generations of Trainium accelerators, AWS chips specifically designed for training AI models.

“Our engineers are working closely with the chip design team at Annapurna to extract maximum computational efficiency from the hardware, which we plan to leverage to train our most advanced underlying models,” Anthropic wrote in a blog post. “Together with AWS, we are laying the technology foundation — from silicon to software — that will support the next generation of AI research and development.”

Anthropic says Amazon’s new cash infusion brings the tech giant’s total investment in Anthropic to $8 billion, but maintains Amazon’s status as a minority investor. To date, Anthropic has raised $13.7 billion in venture capital, According to To Crunchbase.

Information I mentioned Earlier this month, Amazon was in talks to invest several billion dollars in Anthropic, its first financial commitment to the company since a $4 billion deal reached last year. The new investment is said to be structured similarly to the last one, but with some changes. Amazon insisted that Anthropic use silicon developed by Amazon and hosted on AWS to train its AI.

It is said that humans prefer Nvidia chipsets. But perhaps the money was too good to pass up. Around the beginning of the year, Anthropy It is said It expects it will spend more than $2.7 billion in 2024 as it trains and scales its AI products. Anthropic has been discussing $40 billion in new funding for several months. per information, and no doubt the pressure was on to snatch something up soon.

Anthropic notes that its work with AWS has expanded over the years. Through Amazon Bedrock, AWS’s platform for hosting and configuring models, Anthropic’s Claude family of models is used by “tens of thousands” of companies, Anthropic says.

Recently, Anthropic teamed up with AWS and Palantir to provide US intelligence and defense agencies with access to Cloud.

Aside from AWS, Amazon is said to be working with Anthropic to revamp previous consumer products. Reportedly, Amazon is set to… replace In-house prototypes run Alexa, its virtual assistant, with Anthropic’s after facing technical challenges.

The collaboration – and investments – have attracted scrutiny from regulators.

The FTC earlier this year sent a letter to Amazon, as well as Microsoft and Google, require companies to explain the impacts of their investments in startups like Anthropic on the competitive landscape of generative AI. Google has also invested in Anthropic, pumping $2 billion into the company late last October and taking a 10% stake, while Microsoft is a major backer of OpenAI.

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority, which has also opened several investigations into Big Tech’s relationships with AI startups, recently approved Alphabet’s partnership and investment in Anthropic after greenlighting Amazon’s investment last year.

Anthropic continues to keep pace with other leading AI labs, including OpenAI, as it launches new capabilities like Computer Use, which allows its current top model to perform tasks on a computer autonomously. But the company has faced its share of setbacks as well. Recently, it unexpectedly raised the price of one of its models. The timeline for the release of the next generation of Claude’s best-in-class model, the 3.5 Opus, has been slowing down.

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