Cloud computing is the backbone of modern Artificial Intelligence (AI), providing scalable, reliable, and cost-effective infrastructure for training and deploying AI models. Among the various cloud providers, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the undisputed leader, holding the largest market share and offering the most comprehensive portfolio of cloud services. AWS is also at the forefront of innovation in AI hardware, developing its own custom chips such as Trainium and Inferentia to accelerate AI workloads.
1. A Pioneering Partnership with Anthropic
Recently, AWS announced a strategic collaboration with Anthropic, an AI safety and research company that aims to develop safer and more steerable foundation models. Foundation models are large-scale AI models that can perform a wide range of tasks across different domains, such as natural language processing, computer vision, and audio processing. Examples of foundation models include GPT-3, CLIP, and DALL-E.
Anthropic is one of the most prominent players in the foundation model space, having developed Claude 2, a state-of-the-art generative model that can produce coherent and diverse text, images, and audio based on natural language inputs. Claude 2 is also designed with safety and controllability in mind, allowing users to steer its outputs and avoid harmful outcomes.
2. Foundation Models: AI’s Heavy Hitters
As part of the collaboration, Anthropic will use AWS as its primary cloud provider for mission-critical workloads, including safety research and future foundation model development. Anthropic will also train and deploy its future foundation models on AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips, taking advantage of AWS’s high-performance, low-cost machine learning accelerators. In addition, Anthropic will make its future foundation models accessible to millions of developers and provide AWS customers with early access to unique features for model customization and fine-tuning capabilities, all through Amazon Bedrock, AWS’s fully managed service that provides secure access to the industry’s top foundation models.
3. Amazon’s Big Bet on Anthropic
Amazon will also invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic and have a minority ownership position in the company. Amazon developers and engineers will be able to build with Anthropic models via Amazon Bedrock so they can incorporate generative AI capabilities into their work, enhance existing applications, and create net-new customer experiences across Amazon’s businesses.
4. Shifting Cloud Computing’s Power Balance
This collaboration has significant implications for the power dynamics of cloud computing and the AI industry. By choosing AWS as its primary cloud provider, Anthropic is endorsing AWS’s leadership in AI hardware and cloud services. Anthropic’s reliance on AWS could also lure other AI startups and enterprises that are interested in using or building foundation models to adopt AWS as their preferred cloud platform. This could further consolidate AWS’s position as a premier choice for AI-centric businesses.
Moreover, making its foundation models available on Amazon Bedrock, Anthropic is expanding the reach and impact of its generative AI technology. AWS customers will be able to leverage Anthropic’s models for a wide range of use cases across various industries, such as legal, finance, travel, entertainment, and more. For example, LexisNexis Legal & Professional is using a custom Claude 2 model to deliver conversational search, insightful summarization, and intelligent legal drafting capabilities via its new Lexis+ AI solution. Bridgewater Associates is developing an investment analyst assistant powered Claude 2 to generate elaborate charts, compute financial indicators, and create summaries of the results. Lonely Planet reduced its itinerary generation costs almost 80 percent after deploying Claude 2; synthesizing its decades of travel content to deliver cohesive, highly accurate travel recommendations.
5. Leading the Way in AI Safety
Anthropic and AWS are both committed to the safe training and deployment of advanced foundation models. AWS is an industry leader in cloud security and, as part of this agreement, is committed to promoting and implementing safety best practices on Amazon Bedrock to ensure the responsible use of its products and services. Anthropic is also conducting frontier safety research to ensure that its foundation models are aligned with human values and can be steered users.
6. Conclusion
The strategic collaboration between AWS and Anthropic is a landmark deal that will shape the future of cloud computing and generative AI. By combining their respective expertise and resources, AWS and Anthropic will be able to accelerate the development of safer and more powerful foundation models that can benefit millions of customers around the world.
