Anthropic is considered a rival to ChatGPT creator OpenAI
Google has confirmed a recent $2 billion investment into Anthropic, a San Francisco-based generative AI startup, that is considered a serious rival to ChatGPT creator OpenAI. Details remain scarce; however, it has been reported that Google’s investment includes $500 million upfront, and that in April the tech giant invested hundreds of millions into the Anthropic for what was then a 10% stake.
Google’s latest investment is reportedly comes just one month after the startup secured a $4 billion investment from Amazon. Additionally, Anthropic will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to build, train and deploy its future foundation models, while AWS will become Anthropic’s primary cloud provider for mission critical workloads, including safety research and future foundation model development.
Google’s latest Cloud Next event heavily focused on the company’s AI efforts, and included announcements around new capabilities for its Vertex AI platform, as well as the general availability of its Duet AI assistant across its suite of Workspace apps. At the event, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the company is taking an “AI-first approach” and applying AI in as many places as possible, with Thomas Kurian, CEO, Google Cloud, adding later that this means “putting genAI tools into the hands of everyone across the organization — from IT, to operations, to security, to the board room.”
With such ambitions in mind, the interest in Anthropic makes sense. The startup is responsible for Claude 2, a chatbot with the ability to summarize up to about 75,000 words — compared to Chat GPT’s 3,000 words — according to the company.
For more about Google’s cloud and AI efforts, download the Google Cloud Next ’23 in Review report.
