Amazon plans to invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic, an artificial intelligence (AI) startup, the company announced on Monday. 

 

 

The multibillion-dollar investment marks the tech giant’s latest effort to compete with rivals like Google and Microsoft on the rapidly developing frontier of AI.

 

As part of its agreement with Anthropic, Amazon will gain a minority ownership position in the company, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) will become the start-up’s primary cloud provider.

 

“We have tremendous respect for Anthropic’s team and foundation models, and believe we can help improve many customer experiences, short and long-term, through our deeper collaboration,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said.

 

Earlier this year, Microsoft similarly announced its plans to invest billions of dollars into OpenAI, the company behind the popular ChatGPT generative language tool.

 

While the two companies declined to offer specifics at the time, several outlets reported that the deal was for $10 billion.

 

Read more about Amazon’s investment in Anthropic in a full report at TheHill.com.

I must admit I've used AI a few times. I can't say I have found it revolutionary or compelling. I can't see me using it much in the future in its current form. I think Amazon's interest is to use out to better target the ads it sends to you, and to be honest, they need to improve, they are so bad that I have them all go to spam and they self delete after one month. The place I would really like to see AI used in in targeting Kindle. Their suggestions for 'books I might like' are way, way off. I also made the mistake of signing up for "Goodreads" which is another vehicle for selling books. Goodreads is somehow incapable of knowing which book I am reading now, incapable of seeing whether it is a new read of a re-read, and incapable of inferring whether I like the endless "suggested reading" ads they send me. Poor, awful, inane don't even begin to describe the awfulness of Kindle's as targeting.