There was a lot of big news in the tech world this week, but one of the most significant involved Amazon.com Inc. announcing it would invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic, the San Francisco-based startup behind the Claude 2 large language model. Anthropic’s newest and most advanced model, Claude 2, is designed to compete with OpenAI’s GPT-4.

It was a huge week for Amazon, according to theCUBE industry analyst John Furrier (pictured, left). Anthropic is reportedly gearing up to develop a highly advanced foundational model, Claude Next.

“Anthropic gives them a major piece of the puzzle,” Furrier said, on the latest episode of theCUBE Podcast. “They’ve got the training and inference stuff with Anthropic. That’s going to give them an OpenAI alternative.”

The ongoing AI wars

The war over artificial intelligence continues, according to Furrier. There are also interesting subjects to focus on when one pulls out the data around this subject, according to theCUBE industry analyst Dave Vellante (right).

“The data is actually really interesting on what customers are doing. This is more enterprise focus, which is kind of the area that we focus on mostly,” Vellante said. “When you look at who’s using and plans to evaluate, Microsoft Azure and OpenAI are tops; 60% of the customers say they’re doing stuff or playing around with it.”

Second is Google LLC with Vertex AI, and third is Amazon in terms of who people plan to utilize or evaluate it once Amazon Bedrock becomes generally available, which has now happened. No. 2, maybe even tied for No. 1, is “other,” according to Vellante.

“I found that really interesting,” he said. “Others, we’re talking about Meta, Anthropic, Falcon, Cohere, Hugging Face, all these other alternatives. What that says to me is this thing is wide open.”

Others who popped up in the data included IBM Corp’s watsonx and Oracle Corp. The data suggests this is a wide-open field, and Amazon’s investment in Anthropic makes a big difference, Vellante noted.

“Amazon is right there, and developers — I mean, Amazon could be in a good position here if they don’t screw it up,” Vellante added.

Legal challenges loom

Despite the big purchase, Amazon is facing a legal challenge from the Federal Trade Commission. This week, the 17 state attorneys general sued Amazon for allegedly using anticompetitive business tactics in the e-commerce market. The move raised questions about how Amazon is hurting people, according to Furrier. It also further called into question how the FTC has been operating.

“People rise to the top, beat the competition, sometimes put them out of business. Is this the way we want to have people like [FTC Chair] Lina Khan, who are taking this vision of their view of the world?” Furrier said. “It just seems like her tactical execution, and why she’s doing these things, it’s the exact opposite of what we need to do to help our citizens and consumers.”

It feels as though the public-private partnerships in the United States are deteriorating, according to Vellante. Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates, talked on this subject at the All-In Summit in September.

“He went back in history and looked at all the great powers and the ascendancy and decline of these great powers and their reserve currency,” Vellante said. “The guy did some amazing research. And, of course, I like him because he’s very concerned about debt.”

Dalio presented a number of factors that led to the rise and fall of nations, including education, technology, competitiveness, economic output and world trade. It all leads to the reserve currency, Vellante noted.

“The point is, that when you think about the public and private partnership, those are the factors where the investment should be,” he said. “And I feel like the U.S. government is attacking a lot of that innovation. We don’t have enough STEM students, right? It’s going to eventually impact technology. [JC2 Ventures’] John Chambers said this: There’s just no guarantee for the future. You’ve got to go earn it.”

Tesla Inc. CEO Elon Musk has also discussed how things get invented because people take chances and risks. Technology just doesn’t happen, Vellante noted.

“It takes real effort,” he said. “That’s where if a government is working against private industry; that’s going to be a real detriment to the success of a nation. And I don’t understand why many in our government don’t see this.”

Watch the full podcast below to find out why these industry pros were mentioned:

Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission
Andy Jassy, president and CEO of Amazon
Jony Ive, former SVP of industrial design and CDO of Apple
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms
Lex Fridman, research scientist at MIT
Linda Yaccarino, CEO of X
Paul Martino, founder of Bullpen Capital
Sal Khan, CEO of Khan Academy
Babe Ruth, legendary professional baseball player
Matt Baker, SVP of AI Strategy for Dell Technologies
Scott Johnston, CEO of Docker
Erik Bradley, chief strategist and director of research at ETR
Tara Murphy Dougherty, CEO of Govini
John Chambers, CEO of JC2 Ventures
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla
Adam Selipsky, CEO of AWS
Yoel Roth, internet personality, a Knight Visiting Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, a technology policy fellow at UC Berkeley, and a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Clay Shirky, vice provost for AI and technology in education at NYU
Cory Doctorow, author, journalist and activist
Jeff Jarvis, professor, director Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY

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Photo: SiliconANGLE