Amazon is investing up to $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.
Sean “Diddy” Combs Is Arrested In NY After Federal Indictment
Sean "Diddy" Combs, the hip-hop mogul who has faced a stream of allegations by women accusing him of sexual assault, was arrested late Monday in New York after he was indicted by a federal grand jury.
The indictment was sealed and details of the charges weren't immediately announced by prosecutors, but the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, Damian Williams, confirmed in a statement that federal agents had Combs in custody.
"We expect to move to unseal the indictment in the morning and will have more to say at that time," Williams said in a statement.
Combs was arrested in a Manhattan hotel lobby, according to a person familiar with the arrest who spoke with The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
His lawyer, Marc Agnifilo, said Combs had been cooperating with the investigation and had relocated to New York last week in anticipation of charges being brought.
"We are disappointed with the decision to pursue what we believe is an unjust prosecution of Mr. Combs by the U.S. Attorney's Office," Agnifilo said, describing his client as a music icon and a "loving family man."
"He is an imperfect person, but he is not a criminal," Agnifilo said in a statement, adding "Please reserve your judgment until you have all the facts. These are the acts of an innocent man with nothing to hide, and he looks forward to clearing his name in court."
The criminal charges are a major but not unexpected takedown of one of the most prominent producers and most famous names in the history of hip-hop.
The federal investigation of Combs, 58, was revealed when Homeland Security Investigations agents served simultaneous search warrants and raided Combs' mansions in Los Angeles and Miami... Read More