Amazon recently announced a $4 billion bet on OpenAI competitor Anthropic, an artificial intelligence (AI) unicorn company, to increase the layout of the AI cloud. The investment is Amazon’s largest to date in the field of generative artificial intelligence, taking on two major competitors Google and Microsoft.
However, just a few days after Amazon announced the investment, the news that Anthropic is refinancing came out. On October 4, it was announced that Anthropic is in talks with Google and other investors to raise at least $2 billion more in a new round of funding, which could result in a post-investment valuation of $20-30 billion – more than five times the company’s $4 billion valuation in March this year. For a time, the two-year-old artificial intelligence startup was all the rage.
Anthropic: OpenAI competitor?
It is reported that Anthropic AI was founded in 2021 by Dario Amodei, former Vice President of research at OpenAI, Jared Kaplan, Sam McCandlish, and Tom, former OpenAI employees who were core participants in the development of GPT-2 and GPT-3 Brown et al. In January this year, Anthropic released Claude, an AI chatbot model based on AnthropicLM v4-s3, which is highly recognized in the technical circle and is considered to be a strong competitor to ChatGPT.
Anthropic told investors that the company’s annual revenue has been about $100 million, but because of the deep cooperation with Amazon, it is expected that its revenue will increase significantly in 2023, will reach $200 million, and monthly revenue will be close to $17 million. By the end of 2024, Anthropic’s annual revenue will reach $500 million, which is 1/200 of Anthropic’s valuation and much higher than OpenAI’s valuation multiple.
With this transaction, Amazon AWS will become the primary cloud provider for Anthropic’s mission-critical workloads and will enhance existing applications by incorporating Anthropic’s generative AI capabilities to enhance the intelligent experience across businesses. At the same time, Anthropic will also use a large number of new AI chips purchased from Amazon to compete with Nvidia to train its future AI models and accelerate its own AI layout.
Industry analysts said that the outstanding ability and experienced R & D team, sufficient resources and financial capacity, and the advance layout in the field of artificial intelligence – these three elements make Anthropic become a new star in the field, and Microsoft’s OpenAI and Google’s DeepMind are listed as the top three companies in the current global AI field. More importantly, Anthropic is also the only startup company that is not deeply bound to Dacheng. In addition to Amazon, Anthropic also has similar cooperation with Google Cloud, Zoom and other companies.
Amazon: Join the AI team battle?
Industry insiders pointed out that all this seems to be the competition between Anthropic and OpenAI, but behind it is the giant battle between Amazon and Microsoft, Google and other old rivals. Microsoft and OpenAI have joined forces to stir up the global AI market and take the lead in it. Google with self-developed large models and related products high-profile, quickly keep up with the wave. With the growing tide of generative artificial intelligence, Amazon, which had been watching the fire from the outside, finally couldn’t sit still, chose to imitate the model of Microsoft and OpenAI, bet heavily on Anthropic, and joined the AI group war.
In order to recover the backward situation in artificial intelligence, Amazon is trying to find a new way to walk out of a unique road with its own characteristics. On the one hand, unlike Microsoft and Google, which cut into the practice of consumer products, Amazon focuses on enterprise users with the AWS platform, and its products cover IaaS instances, PaaS platforms, and SaaS software full-stack technology layers. For example, Big Model Titan allows customers to customize Titan models using their own data. Bedrock, a cloud service, allows users to use base models offered by Amazon and other startups, including Anthropic; CodeWhisperer, a generative AI code development service, helps developers write, debug, optimize, and deploy code. Low-cost, high-performance generative AI instance EC2 Inf2 uses Amazon’s self-developed Inferentia2 chip to provide high-performance and relatively low-cost AI inference.
On the other hand, Amazon is also shortening its own expansion cycle in the field of artificial intelligence through “buy buy buy”. Mergers and acquisitions have played an important role in Amazon’s business expansion. From a simple online bookseller to the largest e-commerce platform, and then through the middle and late stages of inclusiveness to achieve international layout, investment and mergers have left a strong mark in the history of Amazon’s e-commerce expansion.
Whether it replaces research and development with acquisitions or buys competitors, Amazon is adept at consolidating its dominance through acquisitions. “If Amazon realizes that a company poses a threat to it, it often does not continue to fight for the market, but directly acquires the competitor,” said an expert.
Compared with Microsoft’s initial investment in OpenAI of only $1 billion, Amazon’s purchase of Anthropic is $4 billion, and the industry is looking forward to what kind of chain reaction will occur in the future.