Google Invests $2 Billion in OpenAI Competitor Anthropic

(CTN News) – Google has agreed to invest up to $2 billion in Anthropic, an artificial intelligence startup founded by former OpenAI executives, according to confirmation from CNBC.

This investment commitment consists of an initial cash infusion of $500 million and an additional $1.5 billion to be invested over time. The Wall Street Journal had previously reported on this planned financing.

Anthropic is the developer of Claude 2, a chatbot that competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and is utilized by companies like Slack, Notion, and Quora. The company was established in 2021 and, in addition to Google, has secured funding from Salesforce and Zoom. It was valued at $4.1 billion earlier this year.

Claude 2 possesses the capability to summarize lengthy content of up to approximately 75,000 words, which is equivalent to the length of a book.

Users can input extensive data sets and request summaries through memos, letters, or stories. In comparison, ChatGPT can handle around 3,000 words.

Research conducted by Arthur AI, a machine learning monitoring platform, found that Claude 2 excels in “self-awareness,” meaning it accurately assesses what it knows and can answer questions for which it has sufficient training data. In this aspect, Claude 2 outperformed chatbots from Meta, Cohere, and OpenAI.

In April, Google initially invested $300 million in Anthropic, acquiring a 10% stake in the company.

During the same month, Anthropic was among four companies invited to the White House to discuss responsible AI development with Vice President Kamala Harris. The other participants were Google’s parent company, Alphabet, Microsoft, and OpenAI.

Shortly thereafter, in May, Anthropic secured a substantial funding round of $450 million, marking the largest investment round for an AI company since Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI in January, according to PitchBook data.

Anthropic was co-founded by Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s former Vice President of Research, and his sister, Daniela Amodei, who held the position of Vice President of Safety and Policy at OpenAI. Several other former OpenAI research professionals were also part of Anthropic’s founding team.

Dario Amodei explained that Anthropic invested at least two months in developing its latest chatbot, employing a team of 30 to 35 individuals dedicated to the AI model, with 150 people providing support.

He highlighted the rapid growth of the market for large language models and the considerable demand for these systems, emphasizing that there is substantial room for multiple players to succeed in this evolving landscape.

The investment from Google underlines the intensifying competition in AI and the increasing significance of chatbots and large language models in various applications across industries.