Dive Brief:
- Amazon will invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic, gaining a minority stake in the company as part of the investment, the companies announced Monday.
- AWS is set to become Anthropic’s primary cloud provider for critical workloads. Anthropic teams will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips for model training and deployment along with existing solutions.
- “Training state-of-the-art models requires extensive resources, including compute power and research programs,” Anthropic said in a blog post. “Amazon’s investment and supply of AWS Trainium and Inferentia technology will ensure we’re equipped to continue advancing the frontier of AI safety and research.”
Dive Insight:
Founded in 2021, Anthropic began with former employees from OpenAI. Now, the company is positioned as one of OpenAI’s top competitors.
Anthropic’s Claude model previously lagged behind others in the space when performing coding tasks, but the company beefed up its model’s coding skills in July as OpenAI looked to do the same with its models. Anthropic’s Claude 1.3 model scored 56% on a coding test, while Claude 2 scored 71%, according to Anthropic research.
Anthropic has raised funds from other leaders in the enterprise technology landscape, including $450 million in a Series C funding round from Google, Salesforce and Zoom in May.
Amazon expanded its generative AI offerings through its Bedrock service to include access to Claude 2 in July along with Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion XL 1.0 and two Cohere models.
“Anthropic has made the creation and delivery of responsible AI technologies one of their foundational principles,” Forrester Senior Analyst Rowan Curran said in an email. “Paired with Amazon’s emphasis on privacy and security aspects when using their own models in Bedrock, this could potentially be an appealing alternative for companies and governments who want to deploy LLMs at scale in a secure cloud environment.”
Anthropic declined to comment on the timeline of the Amazon investment and its current cloud environment. In February, the company said it had chosen Google Cloud as “its cloud provider” while it focused on developing and deploying Claude. The partnership was designed for Google Cloud and Anthropic to co-develop AI computing systems.
Amazon’s investment in Anthropic comes at a time when investors award companies for AI-related announcements, investments and partnerships. Two-thirds of companies that mentioned AI in an earnings call this year saw their stock rise, according to research from Wall Street Zen.
The number of AI mentions in Q2 2023 earnings calls also reached an all-time high at more than 7,350, which was a 366% increase compared to the 1,500 mentions of AI in Q1 2023.
There are signs, however, that investors and customers are now looking for more than just a simple mention or partnership announcement to get attention.
“After dominating the spotlight, investors are growing impatient with the lack of revenue growth from generative AI innovators,” according to PitchBook’s Q2 2023 artificial intelligence and machine learning report in August. “No longer are big tech stocks going up after new product or partnership announcements.”
But that’s not to say interest in AI and generative AI has withered completely; there are still opportunities for start-ups. Venture capital deal activity rebounded in Q2 2023 with $19.4 billion invested, according to PitchBook data. Venture capital deal activity in the first quarter of 2023 was dominated by Microsoft’s $12.7 billion investment in OpenAI. Without the Microsoft-OpenAI investment, venture capital deal activity reached $10 billion total in Q1 2023.
