Amazon is planning to invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic, an AI safety and research company, to enhance its products and services, including AWS, its e-commerce platform, and its smart home devices.
“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,” said Andy Jassy, Amazon CEO in a prepared statement. “Customers are quite excited about Amazon Bedrock, AWS’s new managed service that enables companies to use various foundation models to build generative AI applications on top of, as well as AWS Trainium, AWS’s AI training chip, and our collaboration with Anthropic should help customers get even more value from these two capabilities.”
Anthropic, which has been an AWS customer since 2021, has built a foundation model named Claude. The model leverages generative AI to complete various tasks, including content production and is used by a variety of industries, including finance and legal.
Betting Big on AI
AI is rapidly becoming table stakes for Amazon.
Last month, the company revealed that it’s using generative AI to improve the customer reviews experience. Helping to assist consumers through the mass amount of reviews they may look through before making a purchase, Amazon is leveraging generative AI to highlight some common themes that come out and is summarizing everything for shoppers to streamline the process.
“We want to make it even easier for customers to understand the common themes across reviews, and with the recent advancements in generative AI, we believe we have the technical means to address this long-standing customer need,” wrote Vaughn Schermerhorn, Director of Community Shopping at Amazon in a blog post. “Want to quickly determine what other customers are saying about a product before reading through the reviews? The new AI-powered feature provides a short paragraph right on the product detail page that highlights the product features and customer sentiment frequently mentioned across written reviews to help customers determine at a glance whether a product is right for them.”
More recently, Amazon announced that its digital assistant Alexa is going to get even more sophisticated and smarter with the help of generative AI. While Alexa hasn’t been updated yet, Amazon announced that soon consumers will be able to more naturally speak with Alexa, ask more open-ended questions and overall, get more personalized recommendations back.
