HQ Team
September 26, 2023: Amazon is investing $4 billion to take up an unspecified minority stake in artificial intelligence systems company Anthropic.
Amazon Web Services will become the primary cloud provider for safety research and future foundation models for San Francisco-based Anthropic, which is planning to run a majority of its workload on AWS.
According to an agreement, Anthropic will have access to computing infrastructure in the form of AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips, which will be used in addition to existing solutions for model training and deployment.
The companies will work together for the development of Trainium and Inferential technologies. Anthropic stands to benefit from the price, performance, scale, and security of AWS, according to an AWS statement.
Amazon Bedrock
Anthropic has made a long-term commitment to provide AWS customers around the world with access to future generations of its foundation models through Amazon Bedrock.
The Bedrock technology is AWS’s fully managed service that provides secure access to the industry’s top foundation models.
A foundation model or base model is a machine-learning model trained on a vast quantity of data. It can be used to perform a range of downstream tasks.
Chatbots, and pre-trained language models such as Google’s BERT, OpenAI’s GPT-n series, are examples of foundation models.
Medical codes are another example and they are domain-specific. Many visual and multimodal foundation models have been made — including DALL-E, Flamingo, Florence and NOOR.
Model customisation
Visual foundation models have been combined with text-based large learning machines to develop sophisticated task-specific models.
Amazon developers and engineers will be able to build with Anthropic models through Amazon Bedrock so they can incorporate generative AI capabilities into their work and enhance existing applications, according to the statement.
Based on significant AWS customer demand for Claude — an Anthropic foundation model — the San Francisco-based company is also expanding its support of Amazon Bedrock, according to a statement from Anthropic.
“This will include secure model customisation and fine-tuning on the service to enable enterprises to optimise Claude’s performance with their expert knowledge while limiting the potential for harmful outcomes.”
‘Unlock possibilities’
Claude, executes a wide range of tasks, from sophisticated dialogue and creative content generation to complex reasoning and detailed instruction, while maintaining a high degree of reliability and predictability.
The collaboration can “unlock new possibilities for organizations of all sizes, as they deploy Anthropic’s safe, state-of-the-art AI systems together with AWS’s leading cloud technology,” said Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic.
Customers accessing Anthropic’s current models through Amazon Bedrock are building generative AI-powered applications.
These applications help automate tasks such as producing market forecasts, developing research reports, enabling new drug discovery for healthcare, and personalising education programs.
The travel media company, Lonely Planet, asset management firm, Bridgewater Associates, information and analytics firm, LexisNexis Legal & Professional, are some of the users of the platforms of the two companies.
Organisational users include the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development AI working groups, the Global Partnership on AI, the Partnership on AI, the International Organization for Standardization and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
