Microsoft and Amazon's investments in the AI field are under review by the UK regulatory authority

According to the Zhītōng Finance and Economics APP, the UK antitrust regulator stated on Wednesday that it is investigating the recent artificial intelligence investment and cooperation relationship between the US tech giants Microsoft (MSFT.US) and Amazon (AMZN.US), and whether their cooperation falls within the scope of regulation under UK enterprise merger rules. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) of the UK, in issuing a call for comments, indicated that transactions that may raise antitrust concerns include Microsoft's investment in the European AI startup Mistral AI, and the investment cooperation between Amazon and the US AI startup Anthropic.

The CMA further stated that it "has not reached any final conclusions on whether these transactions comply with UK merger rules or raise competition concerns in the UK." Comments from relevant parties are to be submitted by May 9th.

It is reported that the European Commission is also analyzing the cooperation relationship between Microsoft and Mistral AI.

In February of this year, Microsoft invested 15 million euros (approximately 16.3 million US dollars) in the France-based AI startup Mistral AI. As part of the cooperation agreement, Mistral AI will introduce its developed open and commercial AI large models into Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform, which is its first distribution partner.

Based on the disclosed announcements, the cooperation between Microsoft and Mistral AI mainly includes three aspects: 1. Microsoft provides cloud computing power needed for model development and operation to Mistral AI; 2. Mistral AI's large models are deployed on Microsoft's cloud computing services for global users; 3. The two parties will explore cooperation to create specific models for specific customers.

Amazon disclosed last month that the company has made an additional investment of up to 2.75 billion US dollars in Anthropic, which is considered the "strongest competitor of OpenAI". This brings Amazon's total investment in the company to 4 billion US dollars. For Amazon, this is the largest external investment after investing 1.3 billion US dollars in the US electric vehicle manufacturer Rivian (RIVN.US).

Among the many global competitors of OpenAI, Anthropic is often considered by investors to be one of the strongest. Anthropic is the developer of the AI chatbot Claude, which is the strongest competitor of the globally popular ChatGPT developed by OpenAI. Claude 2 is currently being used by CRM cloud software giant Salesforce's Slack, as well as by well-known companies such as Notion and Quora on their respective application platforms.

Statistics show that AI chatbots like ChatGPT's Claude can summarize approximately 75,000 words at once, which is the length of a book. Users can input large datasets and request summaries in the form of memos, letters, or stories In contrast, while ChatGPT does not have strict word limits, its memory and focus in conversations are limited, making it more suitable for handling shorter dialogues and content. This makes Claude 2 more suitable for in-depth analysis of a large number of documents, while ChatGPT focuses more on dialogue interaction and handling concise content.

It is understood that Amazon's investment in Anthropic will give Amazon a minority stake in Anthropic, but without obtaining a seat on the board. In addition, another tech giant Google and Salesforce have also invested in Anthropic