Amazon’s $1bn industrial innovation fund is to step up investments in companies that combine artificial intelligence and robotics, as the ecommerce giant seeks to drive efficiencies across its logistics network. Franziska Bossart, head of the corporate venture capital arm that was set up in 2022, told the Financial Times that “generative AI holds a lot of promise for robotics and automation” and is an area “we are going to focus on this year”. She added that the fund’s pace of investment would “absolutely” accelerate in 2024. It made its first investment in a generative AI company last year, the details of which have not been disclosed. The Amazon industrial innovation fund has made 12 investments in total, including in Mantis Robotics, which is developing a robotic arm that uses sensors to work alongside humans. The fund’s search for new investments in generative AI groups comes as Big Tech companies pour billions into developing the technology, which can produce humanlike text, images and code in seconds. Microsoft has committed up to $13bn to OpenAI, incorporating the ChatGPT-maker’s technology into its Office suite of productivity apps and Bing search engine. On Monday, Microsoft announced it has made an investment in French AI start up Mistral. Separate from its innovation fund, Amazon has committed up to $4bn to generative AI start-up Anthropic.  Amazon has innovated in robotics before: in 2022, the company said it had invested more than €400mn in technologies that include industrial robotics and sorting systems in its European warehouses. It has deployed 750,000 mobile robots across its operations network.

Full report : Amazon to invest in start-ups that combine AI with robotics.