Amazon CEO Andy Jassy at AWS re:Invent 2024 (Noah Berger/Getty Images)

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Amazon’s AI plans: custom chips, an Anthropic “ultracluster,” and its own foundation model

While Amazon’s new models appear to be competitive in terms of features and performance, that isn’t the main thing that the company is touting — it’s the cost.

Jon Keegan

12/4/24 2:11PM

This week at Amazon’s AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, the company fleshed out its plans to both serve and compete with the larger AI industry.

AWS is largely AI agnostic. Customers can use pretty much any of the major AI models on the cloud-computing platform, running on servers that use chips from Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm, and others.

But Amazon has also been building and selling computing powered by its purpose-built AI chips, including its latest Trainium2 chip, which Amazon is now making widely available on AWS’s EC2 service. Amazon says these new Trainium2 instances are built for training and deploying jumbo-sized large language models with better price performance than its current offerings.

Amazon also deepened its partnership with AI startup Anthropic, announcing that it’s building an “ultracluster” of “hundreds of thousands” of Trainium2 servers to train Anthropic’s next-generation LLM. Amazon recently doubled its investment in Anthropic, bringing the total to $8 billion.

Probably the most significant announcement was Amazon’s late entry to the foundational AI-model club. Named “Amazon Nova,” the new LLM comes in four flavors: a text-only Micro and three multimodal models, Lite, Pro, and Premier. Amazon touted benchmark scores for the Nova models, which place it in the same class as OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Meta’s Llama 3. Amazon’s multimodal Nova models can ingest and generate images and videos, like many of the other top models out there today.

While Amazon’s new models appear to be competitive in terms of features and performance, that isn’t the main thing that the company is touting — it’s the models’ low, low cost.

Running Amazon models on Amazon servers, powered by Amazon chips, yields significant cost savings and low latency. Amazon says its Nova models are “at least 75% less expensive” than the best-performing models available on AWS today.

Chris Stokel-Walker

Bot bias

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Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

South by Southwest Conference and Festivals

Gold Tesla Cybercabs are piling up, but they’re not picking up passengers yet

Low-volume production started in April. Now people are noticing them more and more in the wild.

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Britain announces social media ban for under-16s starting early 2027

The UK government plans to use the same model for the restrictions as Australia — but how successful has that case study been so far?

UK Prime Minister Announces Under-16s Social Media Ban

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5