The fast-intensifying arms race in artificial intelligence just intensified again. Amazon is investing up to $4 billion in the startup Anthropic, which makes an AI tool called Claude, reports the Wall Street Journal. The initial outlay is $1.25 billion, but it can hit the higher amount if all goes well. The deal cements Anthropic as a major rival to OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT and is backed in a big way by Microsoft. Google is also in the mix with its Bard tool, and parent company Alphabet also invested about $300 million in Anthropic this year, per the Verge.
So what makes Claude different? Like its rivals, the AI chatbot can respond to questions and produce answers as if a human created them. But Anthropic's founders—including former OpenAI employees Dario and Daniela Amodei, who are siblings—say Claude is being trained to "adhere to moral values," per Reuters. The company's execs say they are worried about the potential damage to society that AI might unleash, and thus Anthropic "has sought to position itself as one of the industry's more responsible actors," per the New York Times.
The deal also is seen as a big win for Amazon, because Anthropic will use Amazon's cloud services and Amazon chips for its AI software. Before this deal, Amazon—whose Amazon Web Services is the biggest cloud-computing business in the world—had largely remained "neutral" in the startup race, per the Journal. Another player is Salesforce, which has also invested not only in Anthropic but in Cohere, yet another rival to OpenAI. (More artificial intelligence stories.)
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