Battlelines between rivals are getting increasingly muddled as the AI race enters its third year.
Microsoft, Anthropic and NVIDIA have announced a new partnership. In a joint statement by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, they revealed that the three companies would partner together to meet their AI goals.
As per the new partnership, Microsoft Foundry customers will be able to use Anthropic’s Cladue models. Also, Claude models will be available across Microsoft’s Copilot platform. In addition, Anthropic will use Microsoft’s Azure capacity for its datacenters. NVIDIA and Anthropic have also established a partnership to support Anthropic’s future growth.
Now this is all very interesting because of the entangled nature of the relationships between these companies. Microsoft owns 27% of OpenAI, which competes fiercely with Anthropic in the AI model space. In addition, Microsoft has its own AI models and products which compete with Anthropic. To make matters more interesting, Anthropic had just announced a deal to use 1 million Google TPUs in a deal worth billions of dollars. Google’s TPUs compete with NVIDIA’s own GPUs, and Google and Microsoft compete in a host of areas. Also, Anthropic has also recently announced its own datacenter infrastructure plans, through which it would aim to be self sufficient and not rely on either Google or Microsoft. And the icing on the cake is that Google and Amazon are both major investors in Anthropic.
This might seem confusing, but deals like these might be the smartest way for these companies to navigate the uncertain nature of the new AI technology. Partnerships like these will make sure that AI investments become a confusing monolith, and no one company will be on the hook if these investments don’t work out. In a more traditional setup with clearly defined rivals and collaborators, it could’ve been possible for one side to fail and another to succeed. But with these relationships being so entwined, the entire AI industry is essentially one large entity, and the success — or failure — of one investment will impact all others. But with many people, including Google CEO Sundar Pichai acknowledging that some AI investments could be veering towards irrational territory, it might be the most rational course to pursue — AI as a whole is expected to be a major and successful technological shift, and all companies now seem to be hedging their bets to the overall technology instead of creating disparate camps which could see winners and losers.