Amazon’s huge AI investment | Fuse raises $250M fund

Welcome to a new week, GeekWire readers. VC firm Fuse pulled in a major chunk of cash, Costco is getting deeper into healthcare, and we profiled recent Y Combinator grads. Up top, Amazon makes a big bet on an AI startup. 

Amazon is investing up to $4 billion in Anthropic, a San Francisco-based artificial intelligence startup that is considered one of the world’s top AI labs.

• In its race to keep up with Microsoft and Google, Amazon will take a minority stake in Anthropic, which makes large-scale AI models and a chatbot called Claude. The startup will make Amazon Web Services its main cloud provider. 

• "There is absolutely no doubt that generative AI looks like it’s going to be an explosive additional source of growth in the years ahead,” AWS CEO Adam Selipsky told Bloomberg this morning. 

• Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dr. Dario Amodei (above) previously led OpenAI’s engineering and policy team. Read more. 

Fuse raises $250 million fund: The venture capital firm will use the cash haul — one of the largest funds ever raised by a VC firm firm in the Seattle region — to support early stage enterprise software startups across the Pacific Northwest. Read more.

Meet the Seattle area’s Y Combinator grads: Four startups are tackling a wide range of problems, and many are using AI to do it. Learn about the companies.

Costco makes healthcare push: The Seattle-area retail giant is partnering with a New York startup to offer members primary care and mental health services, joining others including Amazon that are investing in the sector. Read more. 

Hot Links:

• Getty Images created an AI image generator that relies on the Seattle company’s vast library of photographic content. (The Verge)

• Move over Alexa and Siri, OpenAI’s ChatGPT can now talk. And it can respond to uploaded images. (The New York Times)

• Seattle leads all major cities when it comes to the share of residents working in tech jobs. (The Seattle Times)

• Snap is partnering with Microsoft for the ads connected to a My AI, a chatbot introduced previously for Snapchat users. (Tech Crunch)

• Microsoft is looking for nuclear tech experts that can help figure out how to power its data centers. (CNBC)