Google has invested $300 million in artificial intelligence company Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI researchers. It is developing a potential ChatGPT competitor, the Claude chatbot.
Earlier it was reported that Google sees ChatGPT as a threat to its search engine and is looking for a symmetrical answer. So, the company turned to Larry Page and Sergey Brin for help. Since the beginning of the year, the giant has launched work on more than 20 AI projects, for example Bard AI. Meanwhile, Microsoft is investing in a chatbot from OpenAI, which will implement AI in its products.
Google invested in Anthropic at the end of 2022, but this has not been officially announced, says Habr. In exchange, the company received 10% of the shares. Also this week, Anthropic announced that Google Cloud will be its “cloud service provider of choice” and the companies are “jointly developing AI computing systems.”
It was previously reported that Anthropic’s valuation will reach $5 billion after raising funds. According to Crunchbase, the startup previously raised $704 million in Series A and B funding rounds in 2022. Most of Series B was funded by FTX crypto exchange founder Sam Bankman-Freed.
General purpose chatbot Claude is in closed beta testing. It is not yet clear whether Google plans to integrate it into its services. The giant already has a lot of experience developing AI language systems, with media speculating that one of the reasons for the deal was the creation of Google’s cloud computing business.
Anthropic was created in 2021. The idea came from Dario Amodei, former VP of Research at OpenAI. Amodei poached some researchers from OpenAI, including Tom Brown, lead engineer on the GPT-3 language model. He himself left OpenAI due to “disagreements about the direction of the company”, in particular, because of the increasing commercial orientation amid the first deal with Microsoft in 2019.
While AI researchers criticize OpenAI’s move to open ChatGPT without proper security measures, Anthropic highlights its work to build “robust, interpretable, and manageable AI systems.”
NIXsolutions adds that on February 8, Google will hold a presentation where it will talk in detail about its developments in the field of search and artificial intelligence. Experts believe that the company will introduce a competitor to ChatGPT and show the new possibilities of AI-based search technologies.