Artificial intelligence: competition between web giants is intensifying

Competition between Gafam (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft) regarding artificial intelligence is intensifying. Amazon announced on September 25 that it would invest four billion dollars in Anthropic, an American company that has developed Claude, a chatbot competing with ChatGPT.

The logos of the world's biggest Internet giants: Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon. © Getty Images

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This is a new step in the global race towards artificial intelligence. After Microsoft, Meta, Google and Nvidia, Amazon is moving up a notch in the field of artificial intelligence, a fast-growing sector.

With this partnership, the e-commerce and cloud giant (remotely accessible data hosting) is taking a minority stake in Anthropic by making available chips from Amazon Web Service (AWS), the world's largest cloud company. Anthropic is one of the companies at the forefront of the development of the latest generation of artificial intelligence, alongside the tech giants Google and Microsoft. The company, which counts Google partners among its partners, was founded two years ago by former Open AI employees.

Today, we're announcing that @Amazon will invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic. The agreement is part of a broader collaboration to develop reliable and high-performing foundation models. pic.twitter.com/lPJ03oqr6C

— Anthropic (@AnthropicAI) September 25, 2023

This partnership is primarily strategic, with the key to the development of new models of Claude, Anthropic's chatbot, to which users of Amazon's web service will have access. With this agreement, Amazon wants to dig its furrow in this booming sector that whets the appetite of internet giants but also investors.

Personal assistants

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.

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 envy 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 customers across all its activities, the company said in its statement. 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.

AI fuels lust

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.

It must be said that the so-called "generative" artificial intelligence, that is to say capable of generating new content from training data, fuels covetousness. The Internet giants, the Gafam, invest heavily in start-ups in the sector.

Recently, Amazon announced that its virtual assistant Alexa would be equipped with artificial intelligence. Microsoft is also preparing to integrate AI into its Bing search engine. And 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.

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