Amazon may have doubled down on its investment in Anthropic, but it also appears to be hedging its AI bets by developing its own model that can process images and video in addition to text.
The tech giant’s new model, code-named Olympus, could help customers search video archives for specific scenes, The Information reported.
It’s a type of AI — known as multimodal — already offered by Anthropic, the startup that Amazon pumped a fresh $4 billion into earlier this month, bringing its total investment into the company to $8 billion.
Amazon could launch Olympus as soon as next week at its annual AWS re:Invent conference, The Information reported.
Amazon’s partnership with Anthropic goes beyond capital. The e-commerce juggernaut has used Anthropic’s technology to power its digital assistant and AI coding products. And Amazon Web Service customers get early access to a key Anthropic feature: fine-tuning their data through Anthropic’s chatbot Claude.
In return for Amazon’s most recent investment in Anthropic, the startup said it would use AWS as its “primary cloud and training partner.” The deal also includes an agreement for the OpenAI rival to use more of Amazon’s chips.
The development and launch of Olympus could reduce Amazon’s dependency on Anthropic for multimodal AI, especially if the new video model becomes as a cheaper alternative.
The Big Tech giant has a huge repository of video archives, which could be used to train the AI model for various use cases, from sports analysis to geological inspections for oil and gas companies, per the report.
Amazon doesn’t have a seat on Anthropic’s board, but it takes a portion of the proceeds from its sales, as its platform runs on AWS servers.
Amazon and Anthropic did not immediately respond to a Business Insider request for comment.
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