With this partnership, the e-commerce and cloud giant (hosting of remotely accessible data) is taking a minority stake in Anthropic, which has developed Claude, a chatbot competing with ChatGPT, the popular AI tool of Californian start-up OpenAI.

Like the latter, Anthropic is one of the companies at the forefront of the development of latest-generation artificial intelligence, alongside tech giants Google and Microsoft.

The so-called "generative" AI makes it possible to create original content, based on a large amount of data. It provides an interface to the user who asks questions or makes requests for text, music, image, or code.

With this agreement, Amazon wants to dig its furrow in this booming sector, which whets the appetite of internet giants but also investors.

While AI is watched carefully by many companies, they must rely on the cloud giants - Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Google - to have the computing power necessary for its use.

Personal assistants

So these groups decided to partner with AI developers. Earlier this year, Microsoft expanded its partnership with OpenAI through a multi-billion dollar deal.

Anthropic has also already aroused covetousness, since Google invested at the beginning of the year $ 300 million to acquire 10% of the Californian start-up.

Amazon's developers and engineers will be able, thanks to Anthropic's models, to incorporate artificial intelligence capabilities and create new experiences on the internet for Amazon's customers, across all its activities, the company said in its statement.

Amazon has announced that its virtual assistant Alexa will be equipped with AI © Grant HINDSLEY / AFP / Archives

For its part, Anthropic will use AWS chips, developed specifically for the creation of machine learning models, and accelerate the development of future chatbot models.

Big tech companies are rapidly deploying generative AI capabilities in their online software (office, code, search, email, etc.) to turn them into a kind of personal assistant.

A few days ago, Amazon announced that its virtual assistant Alexa would be equipped with AI.

For its part, Microsoft said last Thursday that it would integrate OpenAI's new generative artificial intelligence interface into its Bing search engine.

The AI race is international. At the end of August, the Chinese internet giant Baidu launched its conversational robot Ernie Bot, initially only available for the Chinese market.

© 2023 AFP