Amazon invests $4B in ChatGPT rival company

Amazon is continuing its artificial intelligence technology push with a $4 billion investment in ChatGPT rival, Anthropic. Amazon is also taking a minority ownership position in the company, reports CNBC. 

The move “underscores Amazon’s aggressive AI push as it looks to keep pace with rivals such as Microsoft and Alphabet’s Google,” CNBC said. Amazon and Anthropic said that they are forming a strategic collaboration to advance generative AI, with the startup leveraging Amazon Web Services as its primary cloud provider. 

While Amazon owns Whole Foods, Amazon Fresh, and Amazon Go, the ecommerce retailer has not made it clear how the investment will impact grocery just yet. However, it already touts the use of palm recognition, just walk-out, and smart shopping cart technologies for the grocery segment.

Anthropic was founded about two years ago by former OpenAI research executives and it recently launched a new AI chatbot called Claude 2. Anthropic encourages users to think of Claude as a “friendly, enthusiastic colleague or personal assistant who can be instructed in natural language to help you with many tasks.”

Claude 2 has improved performance, longer responses, and can be accessed via API as well as a new public-facing beta website. “We have heard from our users that Claude is easy to converse with, clearly explains its thinking, is less likely to produce harmful outputs, and has a longer memory,” according to the Anthropic website.

Related:Amazon, Target ramp up holiday hiring

AWS customers will be able to build on Anthropic’s AI models with Amazon Bedrock — a service that lets customers build generative AI applications in the cloud with existing models rather than their own models, as Amazon looks to position itself as a one-stop shop for AI.