Anthropic has raised another $4 billion from Amazon and agreed to train its flagship generative AI models primarily on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud computing division.

The OpenAI rival also said it was working with Annapurna Labs, the chip manufacturing division of AWS, to develop future generations of chips. Trainium accelerators, custom chips from AWS for training AI models.

“Our engineers work closely with Annapurna’s chip design team to extract maximum computing efficiency from the hardware, which we plan to leverage to form our most advanced core designs,” Anthropic wrote in a post of blog. “Together with AWS, we are laying the technological foundation – from silicon to software – that will power the next generation of AI research and development. »

In itself jobAmazon clarified that Anthropic will use Trainium – including the current version of Trainium, Trainium2 — to train its next models. The AI ​​startup would use InferenceAmazon’s internal chip is intended to accelerate the execution and serving of models, in order to deploy those models, Amazon said.

“By collaborating with Anthropic on the development of our custom Trainium chips, we will continue to push the boundaries of what customers can achieve with generative AI technologies,” AWS CEO Matt Garman said in a statement. “We have been impressed by Anthropic’s pace of innovation and commitment to the responsible development of generative AI, and we look forward to deepening our collaboration.”

This new cash infusion brings Amazon’s total investment in Anthropic to $8 billion while maintaining the tech giant’s position as a minority investor, Anthropic said. To date, Anthropic has raised $13.7 billion in venture capital, according to at Crunchbase.

The information reported Earlier this month, Amazon was in talks to invest billions in Anthropic, its first financial pledge into the company after a $4 billion investment. agreement last year. This agreement was divided into two separate tranches, an initial payment of $1.25 billion last September and an extension of $2.75 billion in March.

The new investment would be structured the same as the previous one, but with one difference: Amazon insisted that Anthropic use silicon developed by Amazon and hosted on AWS to train its AI.

Anthropic is said to prefer Nvidia chips, but the money may have been too good to pass up. Earlier this year, Anthropic would have predicted it would spend more than $2.7 billion in 2024 to train and develop its AI products. Anthropic has been discussing raising new funds for several months at a valuation of $40 billion, by The information. There’s no doubt the pressure was on to get something done soon.

Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei noted that its collaboration with AWS has grown significantly over the past year. Through Amazonian substrateAWS’s platform for hosting and fine-tuning generative models, Anthropic’s Claude family of models is used by “tens of thousands” of customers, Amodei said.

“This has been a year of tremendous growth for Claude, and our collaboration with Amazon has been instrumental in bringing Claude’s capabilities to millions of end users among tens of thousands of customers on Amazon Bedrock,” he said. -he declared in a press release. “We look forward to working with Amazon to train and power our most advanced AI models using AWS Trainium, and help unlock the full potential of their technology.”

Recently, Anthropic partnered with AWS and Palantir to provide U.S. intelligence and defense agencies have access to Claude. Amazon said that in the future, AWS customers will benefit from early access to the ability to fine-tune new Claude models on their data.

Beyond AWS, Amazon is reportedly working with Anthropic to revamp the former’s consumer products. And the tech giant is reportedly on the verge of replace the internal models powering Alexa, its virtual assistant, with those of Anthropic after encountering technical challenges.

The collaboration – and investments – have attracted scrutiny from regulatory authorities.

The FTC sent a letter earlier this year to Amazon, as well as Microsoft and Google, demanding for companies to explain the impacts of their investments in startups such as Anthropic on the competitive landscape of generative AI. Google also invested in Anthropic, injecting $2 billion into the company late last October for a 10% stake, while Microsoft is a major backer of OpenAI.

The British competition regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority, has also opened several investigations into large technological tie-ups with AI companies. But the regulator recently approved Alphabet’s partnership and investment in Anthropic; he green-lighted the Amazon deal last year.

Anthropic continues to keep pace with other cutting-edge AI labs, releasing new features such as Computer usewhich allows the company’s current best model, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, to perform tasks on a PC autonomously.

The company has also faced its share of setbacks. The company unexpectedly raised the price of one of its models this month and delayed the launch of its long-awaited next-generation model, Claude 3.5 Opus.

In an effort to increase revenue, Anthropic has shifted its focus to releasing new tools and subscription plans, including a desktop client, business And “team” levels, and mobile apps. He also has open offices in Europe and has recruited high-profile figures, including the co-founder of Instagram Mike Kriegerco-founder of OpenAI Durk Kingmaand former security researcher at OpenAI Jan Leike.

Anthropic was co-launched in 2021 by Amodei, who was formerly vice president of research at OpenAI and would have break with the company after disagreements over the roadmap. Amodei tapped a number of former OpenAI employees to launch Anthropic, including former OpenAI policy manager Jack Clark.

Anthropic often tries to position itself as more security-focused than OpenAI.

Correction: This story has been corrected to remove a reference to Gabor Cselle, who was hired by OpenAI, not Anthropic.

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