Battle of the (chat) bots… Yesterday Amazon said it would invest up to $4B and take a minority stake in AI startup Anthropic. Refresher: Anthropic debuted its AI-powered chatbot (Claude) back in March, and this month it launched a $20/month premium sub plan. Now the e-comm giant will serve as Anthro’s primary cloud partner, and said it plans to use the startup’s tech to improve its biz.
3-hour online convo… with no one on the other end. Amazon’s Anthropic deal follows a trend popularized by cloud heavyweight Microsoft, which made waves after investing $1B in OpenAI in 2019. This year Microsoft upped its investment to $10B with plans to incorporate ChatGPT tech into consumer products like Bing search. Others are playing catch-up, with analysts saying genAI bots could eventually have over a billion users.
Deep pockets can power big disruptors… By working with tech titans like Amazon and Microsoft, AI startups get an opportunity to supercharge growth. Think: access to huge consumer databases and costly computer servers. While ChatGPT is quickly becoming a household name, only about 18% of US adults have ever used it — leaving plenty of room for the competition. It’s estimated that, as of next year, more than a third of the US population will use GenAI tools like ChatGPT at least once a month.