Amazon has announced increasing its investment in the artificial intelligence (AI) startup Anthropic by $2.75 billion.
This follows an agreement the two firms struck last year to support each other and deepen their partnership.
Amazon-Anthropic Ties Strengthen
Combining this investment with the one disclosed in September 2023, Amazon has now invested $4 billion in Anthropic, a highly recognized developer of AI technologies capable of text generation and analysis.
Under the terms of the agreement, Amazon could have contributed the extra cash via the issuance of a convertible note as long as it was done before March 31, as reported by Bloomberg.
San Francisco-based Anthropic has also committed to using Amazon's custom-built computer chips and Amazon Web Services data centers to power a portion of its operations as a part of the partnership.
Among the many large tech businesses with ties to Anthropic is Alphabet's Google, which last May participated in a $450 million funding round spearheaded by Spark Capital. Anthropic has promised to use its processors based on their agreement.
About Anthropic and Its Business
Daniela Amodei and her brother Dario, the chief executive officer of Anthropic, created the company in 2021 after working for OpenAI.
Since then, the firm has raised billions in capital, making it one of OpenAI's most competitive rivals. Most of its consumer base consists of companies producing travel guides, such as Lonely Planet and DuckDuckGo.
Claude, the company's chatbot, is part of an initiative to promote responsible and safe AI development. At the beginning of March, it released updated chatbot software with the promise that it would be less likely to make things up and better at carrying out complex commands.
While chatbots have been around for a while, the technology behind Claude and other bots is a far more potent tool called a large language model. This model is trained on vast portions of the internet to produce text, like a poem or a response to a query.
Generative AI, which includes these technologies, is a kind of AI that takes in data, like a text prompt and uses it to create something new.
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