This week, Amazon accomplished the second section of a deal introduced final September, when it dedicated to investing as much as $4 billion in OpenAI rival Anthropic. The extra $2.75 billion invested is Amazon’s largest examine ever into one other firm and yet one more sign of how vital the event of enormous language fashions has change into to Large Tech. The logic is easy: Amazon wants to supply fashions via AWS that compete with the OpenAI-powered choices of its arch cloud rival, Microsoft, and Anthropic is the very best various that exists. If we rewound the clock again to when Large Tech may make massive acquisitions with out them being blocked by regulators, I’m certain Amazon would have tried to purchase Anthropic outright. As an alternative, it’s passively investing billions of {dollars} and telegraphing that it solely has a minority stake with no board seat. Conveniently for Amazon, Anthropic has in the meantime agreed to spend $4 billion on AWS over the following a number of years.There are apparent parallels right here to Microsoft’s funding of OpenAI’s ever-growing compute wants. However Amazon’s relationship with Anthropic is way much less cozy than it seems on the floor. Actually, one other a part of Amazon is attempting to compete immediately with Anthropic’s fashions. I’ve realized that Amazon’s AGI crew, led by SVP Rohit Prasad, has the aggressive purpose of outperforming Anthropic’s newest Claude fashions by the center of this yr. Its forthcoming flagship mannequin, internally codenamed Olympus, is in coaching and fairly massive with a whole bunch of billions of parameters.