Amazon Reduces Reliance on Anthropic with New Video AI Model

Amazon has developed a generative video AI code-named Olympus. According to Reuters, Amazon’s video AI will likely make e-commerce less dependent on Claude, a bot developed by AI startup- Anthropic.

Claude has been a common feature on Amazon Web Services. Sources close to the e-commerce giant say the company could unveil Olympus as soon as next during its yearly AWS reinvent event.

Customer Support

The new large language model (LLM) has been designed to aid customer search. Amazon’s new LLM, Olympus is a type of AI called multimodal, the same as Claude. It’s capable of processing scenes in videos, images, and text. Using Amazon’s new generative AI model, customers will be able to search for specific scenes using simple text-based prompts.

For instance, a customer can search for a winning basketball shot scene. Amazon has a massive video repository that it could use to train Olympus video AI model for different use cases and scenes. These could range from geological inspections for gas and oil to sports analysis.

Amazon – Anthropic Partnership

Earlier this month, Amazon invested $4 billion in Anthropic, bringing its investment in the start to $8 billion.
Although Amazon has made significant investment in Anthropic, its partnership with the AI startup transcends capital. The e-commerce giant has leveraged Anthropic’s AI technology to power its AI coding and digital assistants for sometime now. Amazon’s AWS users have previously gotten early access to major Anthropic features through Claude.

As a way of appreciating Amazon’s latest investment, Anthropic offered to use AWS as its primary training and cloud partner. The deal also includes a commitment to use more Amazon chips. Anthropic prefers to use Blackwell AI chip-powered servers. Amazon is among the big techs that have placed orders for Nvidia’s Blackwell AI chips.

However, the company announced that its Amazon Nvidia-based systems won’t be available online until early 2025. Amazon is not part of the Anthropic board. However, the company gets part of the AI startup’s sales proceeds since Anthropic platform runs on AWS servers.

Amazon’s Chip Business

Besides having interests in cloud computing and AI, Amazon has been focused in building its computer chips business. The company is reportedly developing cheaper, faster AI chips to counter Nvidia’s Blackwell chips. . In July this year, engineers at the Austin Amazon.com chip lab are said to have developed a new server design. In July 2024, AWS unveiled a new non-AI processor called Graviton. The Amazon Graviton4 chip offers superior efficiency and performance and comes with higher computing power and memory.

Other big techs that are developing or upgrading AI chips in-house include Google, Meta, and Microsoft. Amazon also appears to make significant investments in other AI startups besides Anthropic.

Last week, the e-commerce company made a $4 billion investment in OpenAI. Amazon’s investment in AI startups is part of its strategy to capitalize generative AI technology. The company has been working to counter the thinking that its rivals, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google have taken the lead in generative AI development.