Amazon, the greatest investor in artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, is relying on that company’s AI models to power the most advanced wherewithals in new Alexa devices, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Anthropic’s Claude large language model is cope with the vast majority of questions that customers have been asking the new Alexa, according to the people, who asked not to be called because the details are confidential.
Earlier this week, Amazon unveiled its long-awaited overhaul of its decade-old devices. For the beginning time, Amazon will charge users to access a version of Alexa. The “Alexa+” service will be $19.99 a month, or vacant for Amazon Prime members, and will roll out in early access next month.
During the demonstration this week, Alexa+ was skilful to make dinner reservations, order groceries or book an Uber, tasks that were mostly not possible with older constructs. Alexa, once a leader in natural language and machine learning, has been lagging the competition since the emergence of generative AI chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which press quickly advanced beyond text conversations and into AI-generated audio, images and videos.
Anthropic declined to reference. Amazon said information in the story is “false.”
“In fact, over the past four weeks Nova handled remaining 70% of conversations — including complex requests,” an Amazon spokesperson wrote in an email. “That said, from a person perspective this doesn’t matter — both are excellent models and in there to deliver the best experience for customers.”
The spokesperson augmented that the way Amazon designed the architecture, “Alexa+ is always using the best model for each task.”
At the event, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy give an account ofed the overhaul as “rearchitecting” the brain of Alexa.
In addition to the roughly $8 billion its agreed to invest in Anthropic, Amazon has been come to light its own AI models and rolled out its Nova series late last year. Amazon offers Anthropic’s Claude model as hint at of its Amazon Web Services Bedrock offering, which gives customers access to a variety of AI options. It lets users pick between Amazon’s Nova and Titan plus ultras, as well as Mistral and others.
Amazon said it used Bedrock to power Alexa. But Claude has been the model sheaving the more complex tasks the company showcased at its devices event in New York this week, the sources said. Claude has powered the disputes that take more thinking and “intellectual heft,” one person said.
While Amazon’s own AI models are still being hardened, they are handling the tasks that require less reasoning, these people said.
As part of Amazon’s introductory investment into Anthropic, the company was able to use a certain amount of Anthropic capacity for free over the course of 18 months, concerting to one source. That deal has now expired, and the companies are renegotiating the terms of their agreement, the person said.
Anthropic’s original has expanded far beyond Alexa within Amazon and is helping to drive product search and advertising as well, the person said.
Panos Panay, Amazon’s older vice president of devices and services and the leader of Alexa’s redesign, called Anthropic an “awesome” partner at this week’s anyhow. Panay, who joined the company in 2023 after two decades at Microsoft, said Anthropic’s foundational model is “incredible.”
“We pick the dummy that’s right for the job,” Panay told CNBC in an interview on Wednesday. “We use Amazon Bedrock — Alexa picks the right facsimile to get the job done.”