Amazon doubles down on AI with another investment in Anthropic | TechCrunch Minute

Amazon recently put $2.75 billion dollar Into anthropic an AI model company that Competes with open Ai and alphabet it's Time to put that figure into context so First up this is not the first injection Of capital that Amazon has put into Anthropic a company that created the Clae family of AI models it's in fact The completion of a planned four billion Doll deal that saw the e-commerce and Cloud compute giant invest 1.25 billion Into anthropic last year so presumably Amazon is happy with the progress that Anthropic is making and you can kind of See why Amazon wants to have a horse in This race after all Microsoft has chosen An AI Champion to back alphabet is Building its own models and meta is Taking a more open-source approach but One backed by lots of its own spend in Short Amazon could go out and build its Own models it could go along with Whatever the market and its competitors Put out or it can pour Capital into a Startup that it will own a big piece of And then can lever for its own intern And external needs it's easy I know to Get jaded at the sheer quantity of Capital flying around the AI world that This deal falls under and there's a Couple ways to think about that first of All who doesn't love a competition Inside of Silicon Valley and that Competition has heated up to the point

That we are seeing big tech companies Now invest more in AI companies than Venture capitalists themselves let me Remind you of some of these deals that We have seen over the last couple years Microsoft put 10 billion dollar into Open Ai and and Microsoft led a $1.3 Billion round into inflection AI before Eating that company's Talent without Buying the corporate rapper that was Around them elsewhere Volkswagen put 2.6 Billion into Argo Ai and thropic has Raised another two billion from Google The list just goes on a billion here a Billion there and sooner or later you're Talking about real money why is there so Much Capital flying around there's a few Things that you should keep in mind First of all no major Tech wants to miss A platform shift Microsoft is still Stinging from missing the shift to Mobile years ago and perhaps even more Importantly it's harder than ever for Big tech companies to buy smaller firms Thanks to antitrust pressures so it's Simpler to just invest and buy a Minority Stakes than to take a whole Company under their wing this means that Big tech companies are today competing Via their checkbooks in a space where They can't take majority stakes and as a Result we're seeing massive dollars sure But at huge valuations with big tech Companies betting that they can develop

The future of AI through their Subsidiaries that the world's businesses And consumers will want to use or as my Friend and colleague Devin coldway put It over on Tech runch the AI world is a Little bit like a roulette table with Say open Ai and anthropic representing Black and red no one knows where the Ball is going to land but if your bitter Enemy puts all their chips down on red You might as well bet on black