Competition between Gafam (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft) regarding artificial intelligence is intensifying. Amazon announced on September 25 that it would invest four billion dollars in Anthropic, an American company which developed Claude, a chatbot competing with ChatGPT.
3 mins
This is a new step in the global race towards artificial intelligence. After Microsoft, Meta, Google and Nvidia, Amazon is moving up a notch in the field of artificial intelligence, a sector growing strongly.
With this partnership, the online commerce and “cloud” (remotely accessible data hosting) giant is taking a minority stake in Anthropic by providing it with chips from Amazon Web Service (AWS), the largest company in the world. cloud in the world. Anthropic is one of the companies at the forefront of developing the latest generation of artificial intelligence, also alongside tech giants Google and Microsoft. The company, which includes Google among its partners, was founded two years ago by former Open AI employees.
Today, we’re announcing that @Amazon will invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic. The agreement is part of a broader collaboration to develop reliable and high-performing foundation models. pic.twitter.com/lPJ03oqr6C
— Anthropic (@AnthropicAI) September 25, 2023
This partnership is first of all strategic, with the development of new models of Claude, Anthropic’s chatbot, to which users of Amazon’s web service will have access. With this agreement, Amazon wants to plow its way into this booming sector which is whetting the appetite of internet giants but also investors.
Personal assistants
If AI is watched with attention by many companies, they must rely on cloud giants – Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Google – to have the computing power necessary for its use.
These groups therefore decided to partner with AI developers. At the start of the year, Microsoft extended its partnership with OpenAI via a multi-billion dollar agreement. Anthropic has also already aroused desire since Google invested $300 million at the start of the year to acquire 10% of the Californian start-up.
Amazon developers and engineers will be able, using Anthropic models, to incorporate artificial intelligence capabilities and create new internet experiences for Amazon customers across all its activities, the company said in its press release. For its part, Anthropic will use AWS chips, developed specifically for creating machine learning models, and accelerate the development of future chatbot models.
AI fuels desire
Large technology companies are rapidly deploying generative AI functionalities in their online software (office, code, search, email, etc.) to transform them into a kind of personal assistant.
It must be said that so-called “generative” artificial intelligence, that is to say capable of generating new content from learning data, is arousing desire. The Internet giants, Gafam, are investing massively in start-ups in the sector.
Recently, Amazon announced that its virtual assistant Alexa would be equipped with artificial intelligence. Microsoft is also preparing to integrate AI into its Bing search engine. And the race for AI is international. At the end of August, the Chinese internet giant Baidu launched its conversational robot Ernie Bot, initially only available for the Chinese market.
Also listenDEBATE OF THE DAY – Are the internet giants threatened?