BBC
Amazon will invest up to $4bn (£3.3bn) in San Francisco-based AI firm Anthropic, mirroring the earlier tie-up between Microsoft and OpenAI.
It is the latest multi-billion dollar investment in a race among the big tech firms to exploit the potential of artificial intelligence.
Amazon recently said it would use AI to boost its Alexa voice assistant’s conversational powers.
Anthropic has its own ChatGPT rival called Claude.
Amazon claimed the investment could help improve customer experiences.
“If you look at the world of generative AI, this is the beginning of the race,” Jim Hare of research firm Gartner told BBC News.
While Microsoft had initially reaped the biggest benefit from the enthusiasm for AI through its partnership with OpenAI, he said others were catching up.
“Now we’re starting to see the other cloud providers investing more in generative AI coming up with their own announcements, their own products, and I think the playing field is starting to level off. In other words, it’s no longer a Microsoft-OpenAI show only,” he said.
Founded in 2021, Anthropic, an AI safety and research company, is one of several AI start-ups that have recently emerged to compete with firms like Google DeepMind and OpenAI.
As well as online retail, Amazon is a major provider of so-called cloud computing services. In simple terms it rents out computing power – housed in huge warehouses full of computers called data centres – to other firms to help store or process their data.
The collaboration means Anthropic will be able to draw on this huge computing power.
In turn, Amazon developers will be able to use Claude 2, the latest version of Anthropic’s foundation AI model, to create new applications for its customers and enhance existing ones.
Microsoft, which operates a cloud computing business called Azure, has a similar arrangement with OpenAI.
And days after Amazon announced Alexa’s AI powered planned upgrade, OpenAI revealed on Monday that users of chatGPT would be able to ask it questions by speaking to it, and post images which could be referred to in conversations.
The partnership with the ChatGPT maker has enabled Microsoft to announce a number of new AI-powered features for existing products, including its intelligent assistant for Microsoft 365, Copilot, due to start rolling out on Tuesday.
The deal with Anthropic, according to Nick Patience, lead AI analyst at S&P Global Market Intelligence, was a further symbol of tech…
