Amazon is investing billions in its favorite AI and it’s not yet Alexa
- Amazon just invested another $4 billion in Anthropic
- Most believe that Claude will be the brains of Alexa AI
- Why doesn’t Amazon share updates about its popular chatbot?
The tenth anniversary of Amazon Alexa passed without much fuss and especially without the major AI update that we were promised in 2023. But now that Amazon is investing more than $4 billion (on top of… previous $4 billion+) in Claude AI maker Anthropic the question becomes more urgent: what is Amazon’s AI strategy, and when will consumers and their best Echos get the long-promised AI update? Even more relevant, could that change ultimately be Claude in disguise?
Amazon announced the fresh investment on Friday in a blog post and characterized it as a deepening ‘strategic collaboration’. It’s a two-way street, as Anthropic will use Amazon Web Services’ massive server army as its “primary training partner.” That’s a big problem, because one of the main stumbling blocks for these rapidly developing generative AI platforms and large language models (LLM) is the processing power required to train them.
Nvidia, now the most valuable company in the worldhas turned this into a huge business. Anthropic, still a startup, needs a tech giant like Amazon to support its AI ambitions.
However, it’s the other side of the deal that interests me and probably interests most consumers, and that is Amazon’s growing investment in the Anthropic AI platform, particularly in the Claude models. Currently, they support much of the cloud-based AI that Amazon offers to partners through its Amazon Bedrock platform. The connection missing, or at least not laid out, is how this could affect Alexa, which doesn’t even warrant a mention in Amazon’s blog post.
Still waiting for Alexa AI
Launched a decade ago alongside the Echo, Alexa wasn’t the first digital assistant, but most considered it better than the pioneer, Apple Siri. Echo’s instant popularity and ubiquity in the home meant that millions of people who had never spoken to a digital assistant before were soon engaged with something that sounded at least like a basic AI chatbot.
Today’s Alexa is generations behind leading chatbots such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Copilot. This is despite the fact that Amazon demonstrated a much more intelligent and talkative Alexa AI in September 2023.
The absence of any Alexa mention in the Anthropic news makes me believe somewhat counter-intuitively recent reports that the next Alexa AI will be powered almost entirely by Claude. This, I think, will start with Amazon finally buying Anthropic. I know, you don’t have to; Microsoft has gotten away with keeping OpenAI firmly at bay, pouring money into it and getting the best stuff first, without making it an official Microsoft brand.
Anthropic and Claude do not have the brand cache of OpenAI and ChatGPT. Alexa is the bigger and more interesting brand, so why not make Anthropic part of Amazon and make Claude the true brains of one of the best known and most used digital assistants in the world?
I’ve asked Amazon to comment on the progress of Alexa AI and how Claude could play a role in it, but I haven’t heard back yet. In the meantime, I asked Claude, “Do you want to power the next version of Amazon Alexa?”
As is often the case with these generative AI chatbots, the answer came quickly:
My apologies, but I cannot confirm or speculate on future product partnerships between Anthropic and Amazon. While I am aware of developments in AI technology, I do not have prior knowledge of specific business arrangements. If you are interested in the latest information about Amazon Alexa technology, I recommend that you consult Amazon’s official announcements or press releases.
When I asked Alexa the same question, she quoted the August Reuters report:
At least Alexa knows which way the wind is blowing. Now we just have to wait for Amazon to confirm this and then finally deliver the Alexa AI we all deserve.
