Amazon has no plans to fall behind in the AI race among tech giants. Just as it develops AI features within its services and tools, the company announced that it intends to invest in Anthropic, a company that rivals one of the biggest AI companies, OpenAI.
Amazon and Anthropic
In the company's press release, Amazon says that it will be investing $4 billion in the artificial intelligence company. In return, the retail giant will get a minority stale in Anthropic, which is known to be founded by former OpenAI employees.
Another interesting fact is that Google has already invested $450 million in the AI company through a fundraiser, which has earned the search engine leader a 10% company share. Amazon is expected to get a bigger stake with an initial investment of $1.25 billion.
The partnership will grant the retail giant early access to the technology that is being developed under Anthropic. As reported by Interesting Engineering, Amazon employees and cloud customers will be the first to gain access to the benefits.
The mentioned AI company will be using Amazon Web Services as its primary cloud provider for "mission-critical workloads," and Amazon will also give Anthropic's team access to its computing infrastructure through its proprietary chips.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said: "We have tremendous respect for Anthropic's team and foundation models, and believe we can help improve many customer experiences, short and long-term, through our deeper collaboration."
On top of all that, the partnership will also bring Anthropic's AI assistant models namely Claude and Claude 2 into Amazon's API service, Bedrock. This will allow "customers of all sizes to develop new generative AI-powered applications to transform their organizations."
Amazon is Embracing Its AI Tools
The retail giant is not shying away from the capabilities that AI can bring. For example, Amazon plans on using AI to help sellers create product listings without having to do all the work as the artificial intelligence will do most of it.
All the vendors have to do is provide the necessary information and the AI tool will generate the listing for them, simplifying the entire process. Amazon claims that the tool can create "captivating product descriptions, titles, and listing details," as mentioned in Tech Crunch.
The company's VP of Amazon Selection and Catalog Systems, Robert Tekiela says that with the new generative AI models, users can infer, improve, and enrich product knowledge at an "unprecedented scale and with dramatic improvement in quality, performance, and efficiency,"
Tekiela added that the models generate product information through diverse sources of information, latent knowledge, and logical reasoning that the machine learned. For instance, adding a diameter specification will prompt the AI to identify the object as round.
Amazon has also added AI capabilities to product reviews. Instead of having to scroll through several customer feedbacks, there will be a summarized version of them all, which includes information like what the customers liked about the product, as well as the ones they did not.
