Amazon invests in Anthropic: a clash of principles?
Does the image look familiar? The double-barred “A” from Anthropic’s short version of its logo, combines with the Amazon logo, reflecting the online retail and cloud computing giant’s de facto takeover of the generative algorithm company — valued in a funding round earlier this year at $5 billion — through an up to $4 billion investment deal. The investment allows Amazon to get a theoretical minority stake in Anthropic, but what’s the real deal and the amount of influence that Amazon can now exert on Anthropic?
I discussed Anthropic and its algorithm, Claude, in July after road testing it, finding it an easy-to-use generative algorithm, less prone to hallucination than the ubiquitous ChatGPT, and with much larger capacity to ingest large texts, which made it easier for me to feed it with a large number of my own articles to make it generate new texts or translations in my own style. In addition, I was struck by the commitment to Constitutional AI, a model that seeks to align artificial intelligence systems with universal human values and promote positive social impact.
