The multimodal model, codenamed Olympus, can reportedly search video archives using text commands. It’s unclear whether it can generate video content like OpenAI’s Sora or Meta’s Movie Gen, text-to-video models that are still not broadly released to the public.
But the new model is a sign not only of Amazon’s internal ambitions but also its potentially decreasing reliance on a key investment: Anthropic, the maker of the chatbot Claude.
On Nov. 22, Amazon announced it’s investing another $4 billion into Anthropic, doubling its total investment to $8 billion. In exchange, Anthropic would commit to using Amazon’s Tranium series of chips, Amazon’s “moonshot” attempt to rival Nvidia, the world’s leading AI chip designer.
Amazon already has an enterprise chatbot called Q, as well as AI business solutions for companies through its Amazon Web Services cloud offerings. Olympus could be announced as soon as the annual AWS re:Invent conference being held this week in Las Vegas, Nevada. Matt Garman, who took over as CEO of AWS in May, will address conference-goers on Tuesday and disclose “real, needle-moving changes” on AI.
If Olympus is indeed a business-to-business offering from AWS, then perhaps Anthropic’s Claude will continue being Amazon’s consumer-facing bet while it focuses on the more lucrative work of selling to other companies.
