Google invests in Anthropic, maker of competitor ChatGPT
On Friday, Google announced a partnership with Anthropic, a startup founded in 2021. Anthropic makes Claude, which like ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence chatbot.
According to the $300 million deal, Google will take a 10% stake in the startup financial times. For its part, Anthropic is getting both a financial boost and cloud computing resources it needs. The deal could give Anthropic a valuation of around $5 billion New York Times reported.
Of course, ChatGPT maker OpenAI has money behind it from Microsoft—lots of it. In a deal announced last month, Microsoft will invest $10 billion in the startup. Also, the company invested $1 billion in 2019 and quietly added another $2 billion in 2021. The software giant plans to integrate OpenAI technology into a variety of products, including the Bing search engine, potentially disrupting Google’s search dominance.
The two startups share a certain DNA. Anthropic was primarily formed from a group that broke away from OpenAI after becoming increasingly disillusioned with strategic and cultural shifts. This was recently told by a former OpenAI employee wealth that while OpenAI founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman paid lip service to AI security, “it often just seemed like a fig leaf for business concerns while actual, legitimate AI security concerns were brushed aside.”
Anthropic says it’s focused on AI security — it calls itself “an AI security and research company” — and cites its research on “constitutional AI.”
With the latter, it writes on its website: “We show that language models can learn through self-improvement to follow a set of simple, natural language principles, and we use this new method to train a more benign assistant.”
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has warned of the dangers of advanced AI. In December, he called ChatGPT “scary good,” adding, “We’re not far from dangerously strong AI.” So is he tweeted that his confidence in OpenAI’s security was “not high” and noted that with his help it “started as open-source and non-profit. Neither is true yet.”
wealth contacted OpenAI for comment but did not receive an immediate response.
Anthropic released a limited review of Claude in January and plans to bring it to a wider audience.
“We are partnering with Google Cloud to support the next phase of Anthropic, in which we will bring our AI systems to a larger group of people,” said Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, in a statement. “This partnership gives us the performance and scalability of the cloud infrastructure we need.”
He added, “We are committed to leveraging Google Cloud infrastructure to build reliable, interpretable, and controllable AI systems.”
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