Amazon announced, Monday, September 25, up to $4 billion of investment in the American artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Anthropic, which is developing a competitor to ChatGPT, marking a new stage in the global race for these technologies.
With this partnership, the online commerce and “cloud” (remotely accessible data hosting) giant takes a minority stake in Anthropic, which developed Claude, a chatbot competing with ChatGPT, the popular AI tool from the Californian start-up OpenAI.
Just like the latter, Anthropic is one of the companies at the forefront of developing the latest generation of artificial intelligence, alongside tech giants Google and Microsoft.
Digging your furrow
So-called “generative” AI makes it possible to create original content, drawing on a large quantity of data. It provides a user interface that asks questions or makes requests to obtain text, music, images or code. With this agreement, Amazon wants to plow its way into this booming sector, which is whetting the appetite of Internet giants but also investors.
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.
A race for international AI
Amazon developers and engineers will be able, thanks to Anthropic models, to incorporate artificial intelligence capabilities and create new features on the Internet for Amazon customers, across all its activities, specifies the company 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.
Large technology companies are rapidly deploying generative AI features in their online software (office, code, search, email, etc.) to transform them into personal assistants.
A few days ago, Amazon announced that its virtual assistant Alexa would be equipped with AI. For its part, Microsoft announced last Thursday that it would integrate OpenAI’s new generative artificial intelligence interface into its Bing search engine.
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The race for AI is international. At the end of August, Chinese internet giant Baidu launched its Ernie Bot chatbot, initially only available for the Chinese market.