According to a press release from Amazon, voice assistant Alex will get an infusion of Anthropic’s Claude AI during its refresh next month. Reuters report in which five anonymous sources were cited.
If the news is true, it would be a big win for the San Francisco artificial intelligence company, which recently added an intriguing Artifacts feature to its Claude AI model that displays related information in a separate window.
In June, reports emerged that Amazon was planning a major overhaul of Alexa, costing the company billions of dollars with no sign of a return on that investment. The overhaul would include a paid tier that would offer more advanced generative AI technology to customers.
That plan is still on the cards, with a potential “notable” paid version of Alexa launching as early as October, according to Reuters and reporting from The Washington PostThe new paid version of Alexa could cost $5 to $10 and would be offered alongside a free version of Alexa, but without some of those advanced features.
“Amazon uses many different technologies to power Alexa,” an Amazon spokesperson said in an emailed statement. They didn’t directly comment on whether Claude would be one of those technologies, but noted that different AI models serve different purposes, and Alexa relies on a mix of models, not all of which are language models.
The partnership isn’t all that surprising to those who remember Amazon investing $4 billion in Anthropic last year to develop new generative AI models. It’s also hundreds of members of its Alexa team laid off as a cost-saving measure after years of billions of dollars in losses.
According to the Reuters report, Amazon tried to develop its own Alexa AI technology, but it didn’t yield good results. Anthropic’s technology was able to solve the delays in responses.
“When it comes to machine learning models, we’re starting with Amazon’s, but we’ve used and will continue to use a variety of models, including Titan and future Amazon models, as well as those from partners, to create the best experience for customers,” the Amazon spokesperson added. “That’s one of the key benefits of Amazon Bedrock: it makes it easy for application developers to seamlessly use the world’s best-performing models and multiple models through a single API.”
Anthropic did not respond to request for comment.
