Amazon recently put their money where their mouth is when it comes to generative AI in a big way.

As one of the many tech juggernauts that have declared artificial intelligence as a critical part of their future, Amazon has not made a lot of noise in that area.

That is, until now.

On Monday, Amazon announced a $4 billion investment and partnership with the AI startup Anthropic, the creators of the chatbot Claude.

Claude has already been a surprising dark horse in the race for AI chatbot supremacy, stacking up shockingly well against the big players’ applications, like Google’s Bard and ChatGPT, which is largely funded by Microsoft.

Anthropic’s chatbot is able to summarize up to 75,000 words and is up-to-date through early 2023.

The startup previously benefited from using Google’s cloud services to train their Large Language Model (LLM), but will now switch over to Amazon Web Services.

Recently Anthropic said that in the next few years they hope to develop “Claude Next”, which will increase AI’s abilities by more than ten times.

More importantly, to some, is that Anthropic has committed to the ethical and responsible development of AI, developing a system they call “Constitutional AI”.

The accomplishments of Anthropic through Claude have already been impressive, considering their relatively small access to resources. So the partnership with a tech titan such as Amazon could have very exciting potential returns.

Getting From A To Z

This new partnership mirrors the unconventional marriage between OpenAI and Microsoft, who owns 49% of the AI company.

This unusual arrangement is made necessary by the rarity of the most important resource for developing the LLMs that generative AI programs are built off of…

Data. And lots of it.

LLMs require so much data for their hundreds of billions of parameters, that only a few companies have data sets large enough.

As you’d assume, it’s only the tech giants such as Microsoft, Google, Meta, Apple, and of course, Amazon.

These companies have all either already established themselves in the highly competitive AI field, or have announced their intention to do so in the near future. Companies with AI expertise, such as OpenAI and Anthropic, are able to remain independent thanks in large part to the demand for their product.

So like OpenAI had done with their partnership with Microsoft, Anthropic has now gained access to the data and infrastructure they need to maximize their technology, while Amazon instantly becomes a major player in the consumer-facing AI application market.

This isn’t Amazon’s first dip into the AI pool, although it is their most public one to date. 

Amazon Bedrock was introduced earlier this year. Through AWS, users can build generative AI applications using pre-trained AI models. Some of which were developed by Anthropic.

While it didn’t make quite as big of a splash as widely available applications such as ChatGPT, Bard, or Midjourney, Bedrock served a critical need in the rapidly growing AI market and could be worth up to $110 billion by 2030, according to Grand View Research.

The foundation of Amazon is certainly an appealing one for a promising AI startup such as Anthropic. Along with gaining access to the AWS staff and consumer-base, they will also gain access to Amazon’s deep learning accelerators, Trainium and Inferentia.

So far, AI applications developed for the public has been somewhat of a two horse race between Google and Microsoft (through both ChatGPT and their New Bing search engine). This new move by Amazon instantly makes them an exciting third contender and turns up the heat on AI competition.

With that, we’d like to hear your thoughts. Have you used the Claude chatbot? How do you think Amazon can use AI to improve their products? Let us know about this, or anything, at feedback@technologyprofits.com.