Sci-Tech

Amazon Adds $2.75 Billion to its Stake in Anthropic

Published

1 month ago

March 27, 2024

Amazon said on Wednesday that it had added $2.75 billion to its investment in Anthropic, a start-up that competes with companies like OpenAI and Google in the race to build cutting-edge A.I. systems.

Six months ago, Amazon invested $1.25 billion in Anthropic, making the San Francisco start-up Amazon’s most important A.I. partner. Amazon said at the time that it had the option to bring its total investment to $4 billion. It had until the end of March to do so, according to financial filings.

Still, the additional investment shows the enormous resources that tech companies are pouring into A.I. and is indicative of how much financial support Anthropic needs to keep pace with its peers.

“We believe our strategic collaboration with Anthropic will further improve our customers’ experiences, and look forward to what’s next,” Swami Sivasubramanian, an Amazon executive, said in a blog post announcing the investment.

While Anthropic gets closer to Amazon, it has shed a bulk of the holdings of a controversial investor. Last week, a federal judge granted approval for the bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX to sell its stake in Anthropic. In 2021, FTX invested $500 million in the A.I. start-up, making up a stake of about 8 percent.

The value of that investment has since ballooned. Anthropic’s valuation tripled to $15 billion in just a year, The New York Times reported in February.

Anthropic was started in 2021 by a group of researchers from OpenAI, the company that created the ChatGPT chatbot. At the time, many of those researchers were concerned about OpenAI’s growing closer to Microsoft in a partnership eventually worth $13 billion.

Anthropic has steadily raised funds because developing the foundational systems for generative A.I. requires deep pockets, both to hire staff and to secure computing power.

The Amazon investment in Anthropic is not just a simple equity stake. Like Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI, it includes gaining access to A.I. systems and commitments to provide computing power. But it stops short of the high-value acquisitions that could trigger an antitrust review. The Federal Trade Commission has begun an inquiry to see if these kinds of large A.I. deals hamper competition. (The Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems.)

In a key part of the partnership, Anthropic agreed to build its A.I. using specialized computer chips designed by Amazon. Amazon has said it hopes Anthropic will help its efforts to meet the cutting-edge demands of A.I. as well as collaborate on designs of specialized chips.

Amazon also gets an early shot at making Anthropic’s A.I. models available to customers of its cloud computing service, and this month announced that it would provide access to the most powerful Anthropic models, known as Claude 3.

The bankruptcy estate of FTX agreed to sell about two-thirds of its shares in the start-up for $884 million. The majority of the stake went to ATIC Third International Investment, a firm linked to a sovereign wealth fund in the United Arab Emirates.

Other buyers included the quantitative trading firm Jane Street and the Ford Foundation, a philanthropic group. Darren Walker, the foundation’s president, said in an interview that he viewed Anthropic as an important competitor to OpenAI.

“The fact that Anthropic has emerged and will be a strong competitor is a good thing for the markets, and it’s a good thing for the public and the public interest,” Mr. Walker said.

David Yaffe-Bellany contributed reporting.

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Sci-Tech

Can we really 'reset the internet' to make it safer for children?

Published

4 hours ago

May 8, 2024

Chris Vallance

Ofcom has taken a major step in setting out plans to protect children online, but hurdles remain.

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Sci-Tech

Google Unveils A.I. for Predicting Behavior of Human Molecules

Published

7 hours ago

May 8, 2024

Cade Metz

Artificial intelligence is giving machines the power to generate videos, write computer code and even carry on a conversation.

It is also accelerating efforts to understand the human body and fight disease.

On Wednesday, Google DeepMind, the tech giant’s central artificial intelligence lab, and Isomorphic Labs, a sister company, unveiled a more powerful version of AlphaFold, an artificial intelligence technology that helps scientists understand the behavior of the microscopic mechanisms that drive the cells in the human body.

An early version of AlphaFold, released in 2020, solved a puzzle that had bedeviled scientists for more than 50 years. It was called “the protein folding problem.”

Proteins are the microscopic molecules that drive the behavior of all living things. These molecules begin as strings of chemical compounds before twisting and folding into three-dimensional shapes that define how they interact with other microscopic mechanisms in the body.

Biologists spent years or even decades trying to pinpoint the shape of individual proteins. Then AlphaFold came along. When a scientist fed this technology a string of amino acids that make up a protein, it could predict the three-dimensional shape within minutes.

When DeepMind publicly released AlphaFold a year later, biologists began using it to accelerate drug discovery. Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, used the technology as they worked to understand the coronavirus and prepare for similar pandemics. Others used it as they struggled to find remedies for malaria and Parkinson’s disease.

The hope is that this kind of technology will significantly streamline the creation of new drugs and vaccines.

“It tells us a lot more about how the machines of the cell interact,” said John Jumper, a Google DeepMind researcher. “It tells us how this should work and what happens when we get sick.”

The new version of AlphaFold — AlphaFold3 — extends the technology beyond protein folding. In addition to predicting the shapes of proteins, it can predict the behavior of other microscopic biological mechanisms, including DNA, where the body stores genetic information, and RNA, which transfers information from DNA to proteins.

“Biology is a dynamic system. You need to understand the interactions between different molecules and structures,” said Demis Hassabis, Google DeepMind’s chief executive and the founder of Isomorphic Labs, which Google also owns. “This is a step in that direction.”

The company is offering a website where scientists can use AlphaFold3. Other labs, most notably one at the University of Washington, offer similar technology. In a paper released on Tuesday in the scientific journal Nature, Dr. Jumper and his fellow researchers show that it achieves a level of accuracy well beyond the state of the art.

The technology could “save months of experimental work and enable research that was previously impossible,” said Deniz Kavi, a co-founder and the chief executive of Tamarind Bio, a start-up that builds technology for accelerating drug discovery. “This represents tremendous promise.”

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