Amazon Develops Video AI model to Reduce Reliance on Anthropic: Report

E-commerce giant Amazon has developed new generative artificial intelligence (AI) that can process images and videos in addition to text, making it less reliant on AI startup Anthropic, The Information reported on Wednesday.

The development of the new AI model will help Amazon reduce its reliance on Anthropic's Claude chatbot, a popular offering on Amazon Web Services (AWS), the report said, citing two people with knowledge of the matter.

The new large language model (LLM), code-named Olympus, will be able to understand scenes in images and videos and help customers search for specific scenes, such as a winning basketball shot, using simple text prompts, according to the report.

Amazon may announce Olympus as soon as next week at the annual AWS re:Invent customer conference, the Information added, citing a person familiar with the matter.

Amazon did not respond to a Reuters request for comment outside regular business hours.

The online retailer has been seeking to counter a perception that its competitors Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI have taken a lead in developing generative AI. 

It is worth noting that the development comes shortly after Amazon doubled its investment in Anthropic. The company announced that it had invested an additional $4 billion into OpenAI competitor Anthropic, mirroring a $4 billion investment made last year in September to capitalise on generative AI technology.

The additional investment not only made Amazon, Anthropic's minority investor and it also expanded their partnership for developing and deploying advanced AI systems.

While making the announcement last week, Anthropic had said that it was working with Amazon Web Services' (AWS) Annapurna Labs for 'developing and optimising future generations of Trainium accelerators, advancing the capabilities of specialised machine learning hardware'.

"Our engineers work closely with Annapurna’s chip design team to extract maximum computational efficiency from the hardware, which we plan to leverage to train our most advanced foundation models," Anthropic had said as it announced additional investment by Amazon.