As part of the partnership, Anthropic will leverage AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to build, train, and deploy its future foundation models and the two companies will also work together in the development of future Trainium and Inferentia technology
Amazon to take a minority ownership stake in Anthropic with $4bn investment. (Credit: Shkuru Afshar/Wikimedia Commons)
Amazon has announced an investment of up to $4bn in US-based artificial intelligence (AI) safety and research company Anthropic, while taking a minority ownership stake in the latter.
Both companies aim to combine their technology and expertise in safer generative AI to expedite the development of Anthropic’s future foundation models and make them available extensively to AWS customers.
As part of the partnership, Anthropic will leverage AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to build, train, and employ its future foundation models. The two companies will also work together in building future Trainium and Inferentia technology.
Besides, AWS will become the main cloud provider of Anthropic for workloads that are mission critical. These include research on safety and future foundation model development.
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.
“Customers are quite excited about Amazon Bedrock, AWS’s new managed service that enables companies to use various foundation models to build generative AI applications on top of, as well as AWS Trainium, AWS’s AI training chip, and our collaboration with Anthropic should help customers get even more value from these two capabilities.”
The AI company plans to operate most of its workloads on AWS, which will help it benefit from the advanced technology of the cloud provider.
Anthropic will also offer AWS customers access to future generations of its foundation models. This will be through AWS’ fully managed service Amazon Bedrock, which provides secure access to foundation models.
Furthermore, Anthropic will provide AWS customers with early access to special features for customisation of models and fine-tuning abilities.
Headquartered in San Francisco, Anthropic developed its foundation model, dubbed Claude, which is designed to excel at numerous tasks. These range from sophisticated dialogue and creative content generation to complex reasoning and thorough instruction.
Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei said: “Since announcing our support of Amazon Bedrock in April, Claude has seen significant organic adoption from AWS customers.
“By significantly expanding our partnership, we can unlock new possibilities for organisations of all sizes, as they deploy Anthropic’s safe, state-of-the-art AI systems together with AWS’ leading cloud technology.”
Through Amazon Bedrock, Amazon developers and engineers will be able to build with Anthropic models, enabling them to use generative AI in their work, improve current applications, and design whole new customer experiences across Amazon’s businesses.
Earlier this year, Anthropic announced a partnership with Google Cloud to build AI computing systems.