Amazon has announced new investments in the AI developer Anthropic, raising the total funding to $8 billion. The company has invested an additional $4 billion in Anthropic, the developer of the Claude AI model. Previously, $1.25 billion was invested in September 2023, and another $2.75 billion in March this year.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) will become Anthropic’s primary partner for training AI models. Anthropic plans to use Amazon’s Trainium and Inferentia chips to create new products. This will boost competition with OpenAI.
The partnership with Anthropic is expected to help integrate Claude AI into the next generation of the Alexa voice assistant. The launch of the updated Alexa has been postponed until 2025. It will become more conversational and efficient thanks to new technologies.
Amazon faces challenges in the AI market, lagging behind companies like Microsoft and OpenAI. New versions of Alexa have already been criticized for being slow and having limited functionality. The integration of Claude AI promises to address these shortcomings and make Alexa competitive with products like ChatGPT’s voice mode.
