Â鶹´«Ã½

Skip to main content

Amazon is investing up to US $4 billion in AI startup Anthropic in growing tech battle

Share

Amazon is investing up to US $4 billion in Anthropic and taking a minority stake in the artificial intelligence startup, the two companies said Monday.

The investment underscores how Big Tech companies are pouring money into AI as they race to capitalize on the opportunities that the latest generation of the technology is set to fuel.

Amazon and Anthropic said the deal is part of a broader collaboration to develop so-called foundation models, which underpin the generative AI systems that have captured global attention.

Foundation models, also known as large language models, are trained on vast pools of online information, like blog posts, digital books, scientific articles and pop songs to generate text, images and video that resemble human work.

Under the agreement, Anthropic is making Amazon its primary cloud computing service and using the online retail giant's custom chips as part of work to train and deploy its generative AI systems.

San Francisco-based Anthropic was founded by former staffers from OpenAI, the maker of the ChatGPT AI chatbot that made a global splash with its ability to come up with answers mimicking human responses.

Anthropic has released its own ChatGPT rival, dubbed Claude. The latest version, which is available in the U.S. and U.K., is capable of "sophisticated dialogue and creative content generation to complex reasoning and detailed instruction," the company said.

Amazon is scrambling to catch up with rivals like Microsoft, which invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019, followed by another multibillion-dollar investment at the start of year.

Amazon has been rolling out new services to keep up with the AI arms race, including an update for its popular assistant Alexa so users can have more human-like conversations and AI-generated summaries of product reviews for consumers.

CTVNews.ca Top Stories

A father in Kelowna is furious after his 13-year-old daughter was brutally beaten on Gyro Beach. He is calling for criminal charges in the devastating attack, which was caught on video by multiple bystanders.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith's office says her recent comment about chemtrails doesn't mean she believes the United States government is spraying them in the province.

An Indigenous family has filed a human rights complaint against retail giant Canadian Tire over a pair of incidents that happened on the same day at the company’s Coquitlam, B.C., location.

Trudeau government survives another Conservative-led non-confidence vote

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's Liberal government survived another Conservative-led non-confidence vote on Tuesday, the second in less than a week. This, the same day the Bloc Quebecois had an opportunity to table a non-confidence motion of its own, opting instead to push the Liberals to support one of its key demands.

Local Spotlight

The last living member of the legendary Vancouver Asahi baseball team, Kaye Kaminishi, died on Saturday, Sept. 28, surrounded by family. He was 102 years old.

On Saturday night at her parents’ home in Delaware, Ont. the Olympic bronze medallist in pole vault welcomed everyone who played a role in getting her to the podium in Paris.

A tale about a taxicab hauling gold and sinking through the ice on Larder Lake, Ont., in December 1937 has captivated a man from that town for decades.

When a group of B.C. filmmakers set out on a small fishing boat near Powell River last week, they hoped to capture some video for a documentary on humpback whales. What happened next blew their minds.

A pizza chain in Edmonton claims to have the world's largest deliverable pizza.

Sarah McLachlan is returning to her hometown of Halifax in November.

Wayne MacKay is still playing basketball twice at Mount Allison University at 87 years old.

A man from a small rural Alberta town is making music that makes people laugh.

An Indigenous artist has a buyer-beware warning ahead of Sept. 30, the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.