Tech giants and AI startups
In 2021, a group of engineers abandoned OpenAI, fearing that the leading artificial intelligence company had become too focused on making money. Instead, they founded Anthropic, a public-benefit corporation dedicated to creating responsible AI tools.
Recently, Anthropic officials met with a surprise partner, Amazon, and announced a deal worth up to $4 billion. The ranking highlights how AI’s insatiable need for computing power is driving even the most anti-corporate startups into the arms of Big Tech.
Before Anthropic announced Amazon as a “preferred” cloud partner, it boasted, until last February, a similar relationship with Google. Spokesmen for both companies said that the relationship between Google and Anthropic has not changed. The AI boom is widely viewed as the next revolution in technology, with the potential to propel a new wave of startups to Silicon Valley.
But rather than breaking Big Tech’s decade-long dominance of the Internet economy, the AI boom so far appears to be working to their advantage. Big tech’s warehouses, which house powerful computer chips, are essential for training algorithms for AI-powered chatbots, giving Amazon, Google and Microsoft enormous control over the market.
Although startups like Anthropic AI may have created powerful hacking technology, they still need big tech money and cloud computing resources to make it work. “To build AI at any meaningful scale, any developer will have critical dependencies on resources that are largely concentrated in Only a few companies.”
Training “generative” AI systems, such as chatbots and image generators, is very expensive, as the technology behind them must process trillions of words and images before it can produce realistic, human-like text and images from simple prompts.
This work requires thousands of specialized computer chips in huge data centers that use huge amounts of energy. And demand is rising, so Northern Virginia, the world’s most important region for computer warehouses, added 20% to its total capacity in 2022, according to real estate firm CBRE. However, data center vacancy rates in the region were less than 2% at the beginning of this year.
In January, OpenAI, the startup that sparked the AI boom with its launch of ChatGBT last year, announced a similar multibillion-dollar deal with Microsoft, giving the tech giant deep access to the technology. New users are allowed to launch their own chatbot. Amazon said in a press release announcing the deal that Anthropic’s deal with Amazon does not closely link the two companies to each other, but it allows Amazon engineers to use “Anthropic” models in their products.
*Journalist specializing in artificial intelligence and algorithms
Published by special arrangement with the Washington Post Leasing and Syndication Service.
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