We all know about Amazon’s vested interest in Anthropic or rather a mutual interest. The AI company has not only received $4 billion from the ecommerce giant to advance generative AI, but every iteration and releases of Claude models are available on Amazon Bedrock.
Now, reports claim that Amazon’s new and improved Alexa will be powered by Anthropic’s Claude. This makes one wonder why Amazon would bet big on Anthropic’s AI model rather than their own.
The Best Partnership Ever
Source: X
Amazon’s billion-dollar investment in Anthropic gave the big-tech company a minority stake in the promising AI startup, which turned out to be a huge advantage. The collaboration includes not only financial investment but also a focus on technological development, particularly in AI chip optimisation.
Amazon had been extensively working on bringing generative AI features into Alexa for quite some time now. A few months ago, it was reported that the company was planning to put an additional price tag of $5 to $10 for accessing the new voice assistant, which was called ‘Remarkable Alexa’.
However, the output was not as per Amazon’s expectations. The initial trial runs for Alexa with Amazon’s AI features, struggled with latency. The AI assistant faced difficulties in replying and took six to seven seconds to understand a prompt.
Amazon, then obviously did the next best thing: resort to a superior AI chatbot they have some form of control over.
While the integration sounds promising, the additional price for accessing Alexa seems a bit odd. A user on X asked how many would be willing to pay $10/mo to talk to Alexa when the same user can access it over their phone.
Source: X
Saving Alexa
The fervour with which Alexa-powered Amazon devices such as Echo were released, has slowly fizzled out. With competition from other players, and even a reported dip in the quality of the devices, Alexa was losing its charm.
In 2022 alone, it was reported that Alexa was on track to lose $10 billion. In addition, there were significant layoffs in the Alexa team. With such a form of development, Amazon’s interest in making things right is probably more desperate.
Superior Claude
Without a doubt, Anthropic has been on a roll of late. The company’s latest model Claude 3.5 Sonnet has been a powerful tool for customers and CTOs alike. The model is believed to help developers build and ship products that took weeks to now deliver in no time.
Recently, the company introduced the Claude Enterprise plan, providing organisations with advanced tools for secure collaboration using their internal knowledge. The plan features a 500K context window, greatly enhancing Claude’s capacity to manage extensive datasets like sales transcripts, long documents, and codebases.
Meanwhile, Claude Artifacts, released last week, has helped designers, developers, and executives to transform ideas into reality through simple, visually appealing interfaces. All these features showcase Claude’s superior capabilities that can be easily leveraged for Amazon’s voice assistant.
Big Tech’s Voice Game
Amazon’s strategic move to leverage an AI startup’s model for its product is not new in the tech ecosystem, especially not for voice products. If you recall, Apple had made a similar announcement at their recent developer conference WWDC 2024.
Apple announced that Siri will now be able to leverage ChatGPT’s expertise when necessary. This enhancement was part of Apple’s efforts to improve Siri’s ability to understand and respond to users, making it more intelligent and intuitive.
While Anthropic makes its way through strategic partnerships with big tech companies, the Claude model is not free from controversies.
Recently, Anthropic was found to inject additional text into prompts submitted through their API to prevent copyright issues, a practice discovered by users experimenting with the system. Surprisingly, the additional text inserted by Anthropic is not visible to the user, which could potentially disrupt the expected output of the prompts, especially in unusual or edge cases.
“Unless safety guardrails are very well done – they have the capacity to drive developers to open source, where they have better transparency into model behaviour,” said Campbell Hutcheson, chief product officer at Norm AI.
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