Amazon has announced it will invest the remaining $2.75 billion of its promised $4 billion investment in the AI company Anthropic.
The tech giant said it will spend another $2.75 billion backing Anthropic, a San Francisco-based startup that’s widely viewed as a front-runner in generative artificial intelligence. Its foundation model and chatbot Claude competes with OpenAI and ChatGPT.
The companies announced an initial $1.25 billion investment in September, and said at the time that Amazon would invest up to $4 billion. Wednesday’s news marks Amazon’s second tranche of that funding.
Amazon will maintain a minority stake in the company and won’t have an Anthropic board seat, the company said. The deal was struck at the AI startup’s last valuation, which was $18.4 billion, according to a source.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/27/amazon-spends-2point7b-on-startup-anthropic-in-largest-venture-investment.html
This investment comes a few weeks after the release of Anthropic’s newest AI model Claude 3. Claude 3 is a leap up for Anthropic and represents one of the best challenges to ChatGPT 4’s dominance and technical superiority.
Now I’m guessing most if not all of this investment will go to paying for infrastructure costs. Servers, GPUs, cloud infrastructure… it’s all very expensive these days mostly because AI models require such high quality infrastructure that there’s little room for cost savings (like getting a cheaper 16 core CPU instead of a 32 core). AI models need ridiculously expensive GPUs like Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture which will cost about $40,000 a piece.
It’s all very exciting though. I’d hate for a major competitor to ChatGPT to die from running out of money. A diverse garden is better than a garden with only one plant. Let’s hope other AI companies get what they need to compete as well.
The world of AI is only getting bigger and better.