Amazon, the e-commerce giant, announced on Monday that it will invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic, an artificial intelligence startup that specializes in generative AI. Amazon will also take a minority stake in the company and collaborate with it on advancing generative AI technology.

Generative AI is a branch of AI that can create new content, such as text, images, or audio, based on existing data. For example, Anthropic recently launched its new AI chatbot called Claude 2, which can generate realistic and engaging conversations with humans.

Anthropic was founded two years ago by former executives of OpenAI, another leading AI research organization that created ChatGPT, a popular generative AI model. Anthropic said it will use Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its primary cloud provider and offer AWS customers early access to its AI models and features.

Anthropic will also leverage AWS-designed semiconductors to train its foundation models, which are large AI programs that can be adapted to various tasks. Foundation models are seen as the future of AI, as they can enable more efficient and versatile applications.

Amazon is not only investing in Anthropic, but also providing its own solutions for generative AI. Amazon designs its own chips for training huge AI models and offers a service called Amazon Bedrock, which allows customers to build their own generative AI applications in the cloud using existing models.

Amazon’s deal with Anthropic shows its ambition to become the one-stop shop for AI and to compete with other tech giants such as Microsoft and Google, which have also invested heavily in AI companies and research.

CNBC