Amazon announced this week that it would invest up to $4 billion in artificial intelligence company Anthropic as the AI arms race heats up.
The two companies are forming a strategic collaboration to advance generative AI, and the startup selected Amazon Web Services as its primary cloud provider. Along with the hefty investment, Amazon also took minority ownership in the two-year-old startup.
With the $4 billion investment, Amazon is making big bets on generative AI as it moves to keep pace with competitors Microsoft and Google. Microsoft has reportedly invested $13 billion in OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, and has inked partnerships with Epic to incorporate the technology into healthcare software. Google is partnering with health systems like HCA Healthcare to use generative AI technology to improve workflows on time-consuming tasks, such as clinical documentation. Google also has expanded its generative AI model Med-PaLM, which is specifically trained on medical information, to more health customers.
In July, AWS rolled out a new AI-powered service for healthcare software providers that will help clinicians with paperwork.
Anthropic, founded in 2021, offers an AI assistant called Claude that competes with ChatGPT. Led by siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, who both used to work at OpenAI, the company claims its technology is safer and more reliable than that of competitors, The Wall Street Journal reported.
As part of the collaboration with Amazon, Anthropic will use AWS-designed custom chips to build, train and deploy future foundation models, according to both companies.
AWS customers will be able to build on Anthropic’s AI models via AWS Bedrock, the company’s fully managed service that provides secure access to the industry’s top foundation models. “Anthropic will provide AWS customers with early access to unique features for model customization and fine-tuning capabilities,” Amazon executives said in a blog post.
“Amazon developers and engineers will be able to build with Anthropic models via Amazon Bedrock so they can incorporate generative AI capabilities into their work, enhance existing applications, and create net-new customer experiences across Amazon’s businesses,” the tech giant said.
Organizations will be able to use Claude 2 for a wide range of tasks, from sophisticated dialogue and creative content generation to complex reasoning and detailed instruction, Anthropic executives said.
https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/health-tech/how-amazons-4b-investment-ai-company-anthropic-impacts-healthcare