Tech and e-commerce giant Amazon on Wednesday invested $2.75 billion into AI startup Anthropic, a rival to companies like OpenAI and Google, marking its biggest venture investment so far. The latest tranche of capital injection comes following a similar $1.25 billion investment in September 2023. "We have a notable history with Anthropic, together helping organizations of all sizes around the world to deploy advanced generative artificial intelligence applications across their organizations,” said Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of Data and AI at Amazon Web Services (AWS), as per a company blog post announcing the decision. According to a CNBC report, Amazon will maintain a minority stake in Anthropic and will not occupy a seat on the company's board. This, it says, was decided between the two parties during Anthropic's last valuation, which came up to be $18.4 billion. The report further mentions Anthropic completing five different funding deals over the last year, at about $7.3 billion. The company's GenAI offering, Claude, a family of Large Language Models, competes directly with OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google Bard. Significantly, Amazon's investment announcement comes weeks after the San Francisco-based startup debuted Claude 3.0. Amazon, which quoted industry benchmarks in its blog post, claimed that "Claude 3 Opus, the most intelligent of the model family, has set a new standard, outperforming other models available today—including OpenAI’s GPT-4—in the areas of reasoning, math, and coding". Its investment, crucially, comes in the backdrop of similar and substantial financing of OpenAI by Microsoft. The company has reportedly pumped…
