Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly being seen as a crucial ingredient for success in the business world. It’s no surprise that companies are pumping billions into AI-based tools and solutions.
Last month, Microsoft announced a multi-billion dollar investment in AI research firm OpenAI as a part of the third phase of the partnership.
And now, Google has invested around $400M (approximately €370M) in Anthropic, an AI safety and research company, developing a ChatGPT rival, reports Bloomberg. However, both companies declined to comment on the exact investment figures.
Anthropic also announced that it has selected Google Cloud as its preferred cloud provider to co-develop reliable and trustworthy AI systems.
The AI company says it will leverage Google Cloud’s cutting-edge GPU and TPU clusters to train, scale, and deploy its AI systems.
“We’re partnering with Google Cloud to support the next phase of Anthropic, where we’re going to deploy our AI systems to a larger set of people,” says Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. “This partnership gives us the cloud infrastructure performance and scale we need.”
Anthropic says it will benefit from Google’s deep expertise in large-scale systems for machine learning and shared values around the safe and beneficial development of AI.
“At Google, we believe it is imperative to pursue AI boldly and responsibly,” says James Manyika, SVP of Technology and Society, at Google.
“We are committed to developing and delivering beneficial applications, applying responsible principles grounded in human values and safety, and evolving our approaches as we learn from research, experience, users, and the wider community. Our partnership with Anthropic is aligned with that philosophy,” adds Manyika.
“AI has evolved from academic research to become one of the biggest drivers of technological change, creating new opportunities for growth and improved services across all industries,” says Thomas Kurian, CEO, of Google Cloud.
Kurian adds, “Google Cloud is providing open infrastructure for the next generation of AI startups, and our partnership with Anthropic is a great example of how we’re helping users and businesses tap into the power of reliable and responsible AI.”
Founded by former OpenAI execs
Based out of San Francisco, Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former leaders of OpenAI Inc., including siblings Daniela (President) and Dario Amodei (CEO), as a public benefit corporation.
The company is working towards building reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.
Before Anthropic, the team worked on GPT-3, Circuit-Based Interpretability, Multimodal Neurons, Scaling Laws, AI & Compute, Concrete Problems in AI Safety, and Learning from Human Preferences.
What does Anthropic work towards?
Currently, large, general systems come with numerous benefits. However, they can be unpredictable, unreliable, and opaque. This is what Anthropic aims to address – reliable and trustworthy AI systems.
“For now, we’re primarily focused on research towards these goals; down the road, we foresee many opportunities for our work to create value commercially and for public benefit,” says the company.
Research interests
Anthropic’s research interests span multiple areas such as natural language, human feedback, scaling laws, reinforcement learning, code generation, and interpretability.
Since its inception, Anthropic has conducted research into making systems that are more steerable, robust, and interpretable.
Consequently, the company is primarily focusing on developing Claude, an AI assistant based on the company’s research into building safe, steerable AI.
Additionally, the US company has developed safety techniques like Constitutional AI to devise AI technologies that are easier to rely on and understand.
According to Anthropic, Constitutional AI can learn to follow a set of simple, natural language principles via self-improvement, and can be used as a new method to train a more harmless assistant.
Anthropic says the purpose of this research is to develop the technical components necessary to build large-scale models, which have better implicit safeguards and require fewer after-training interventions.
Additionally, the research will also help in developing the tools necessary to further look inside these models to be confident that the safeguards work.
The company is also building teams and partnerships dedicated to exploring the policy and societal impacts of these models.
To date, Anthropic has published 14 research papers showing how to build language models that are reliable and controllable.
Funding and investors
Anthropic has raised around $1B in funding to date ($124M in Series A, $580M in Series B, and $400M from Google) from various investors such as Jaan Tallinn, Sam Bankman-Fried, James McClave, Dustin Moskovitz, the Center for Emerging Risk Research (CRR), Eric Schmidt, Caroline Ellison, Jim McClave, Nishad Singh, others.
Anthropic is now a growing team of over 40 people based in a plant-filled office in San Francisco, California.
