With the AI race not stopping any time soon, Amazon is already ahead with its AI strategy by investing in one of the leading AI companies to date. For the second time, the retail giant is investing in Anthropic for $2.75 billion.
Amazon Investing in AI
The retail giant's venture into AI is not new. Its shopping site already has AI features that can be used by both selling partners and shoppers alike, so it makes sense for the company to invest more in artificial intelligence.
Back in September 2023, Amazon already put down a $1.25 billion investment in the AI startup, and now, it will be spending $2.75 billion more on Anthropic, as reported by CNBC, which is regarded as one of the frontrunners in its market.
Even with the additional investment, Amazon will maintain a minority stake in the company, meaning that it won't have a board seat in Anthropic, unlike Microsoft does with OpenAI, albeit a non-voting observer one.
At the time of Amazon's latest investment, Anthropic was said to be valued at $18.4 billion, less than half of which came from other funding deals that the AI startup made with other companies. Overall, the funding deals make up $7.3 billion of its valuation.
The additional investment and other potential backings are already expected given Anthropic's latest advancement, particularly with its AI model Claude. The company even claimed that Claude was able to outperform Google's Gemini Ultra and OpenAI's GPT-4.
AWS cloud provider Vice President Swami Sivasubramanian said that generative AI is "poised to be the most transformational technology of our time, and we believe our strategic collaboration with Anthropic will further improve our customers' experiences."
Anthropic's Claude
Claude 3 is the company's latest advancement in AI models, and it is said to be more powerful than its competitors. Like others, it can analyze images, process lengthy documents, and even provide ideas for its users.
Among its capabilities is advanced reasoning, which means that the AI model can perform complex cognitive tasks that aren't limited to simple pattern recognition or text generation. It can even translate between languages in real time, as well as practice grammar.
Furthermore, it can transcribe and analyze static images, handwritten notes, graphs, and photographs. As demonstrated with other AI models, Claude is capable of generating code in HTML and CSS, as well as debugging complex code bases.
Google's Gemini comes in various levels with Ultra being the most powerful. Claude 3 also has a family of models that vary in performance and speed such as Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus. With Opus being the most powerful model, it is well-fitted for enterprise use.
Sonnet is recommended by the company for the best combination of performance and speed, which goes for efficiency. Haiku is the fastest model among the three as it is meant to deal with lightweight actions, but it won't be able to process data the way Sonnet or Opus could.
