Introduction:
Anthropic and OpenAI are both benefiting from leadership in the artificial intelligence area thanks to a rumored $2 billion investment from Google Reportedly Backs Anthropic. The IT giants, who could not respond quickly enough, are giving Anthropic enormous sums of money. A modern-day adage: “Support those who lack the means to create; create opportunities for those who possess them.”
The financial agreement comprises an initial $500 million investment, with the possibility of an additional $1.5 billion contingent on various factors, as reported by individuals with knowledge of the situation, as referenced by The Wall Street Journal. Anthropic has been contacted for comment on the situation.
It reminds me of Microsoft’s massive investment in OpenAI at the beginning of the year, albeit it does not precisely match. However, since Amazon is investing up to $4 billion in Anthropic, the financial difference is presumably more theoretical than real.
The Google investment is the most recent development in an increasingly intense proxy war between competing businesses with few heroes to support. Even while each of these businesses is strong and knowledgeable in various technological fields, the truth is that they could only compete with Anthropic or OpenAI on a level playing field regarding huge language models.
Additionally, they cannot afford not to own a portion of the industry leaders, as everyone is wagering that LLMs will disrupt current business patterns and become essential elements of any future computing platform.
They possess more than just financial resources: setting up the infrastructure required to develop and implement these AI models at the scales necessary for a profitable operation would be equally challenging for AI startups (although it is possible to today doubt that designation). Thus, the agreements also cover mutual aid and compute credits.
However, it would be absurd if they all made identical investments and signed on as clients. Thankfully, there are a few companies that are worthwhile investing in; the front-runners are OpenAI and Anthropic.
Speaking with Dario Amodei, the co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, at Disrupt last month, he hinted about this impending funding infusion, albeit it is only evident now that he did so in retrospect.
Observing the other AI startups, Anthropic has realized that it would be wise to focus more on enterprise products, which may be less eye-catching and captivating for the typical consumer but may offer more excellent long-term financial benefits. Amodei says, “our sweet spot has typically been knowledge work and professional services.”
Google Reportedly Backs Anthropic:
Google Reportedly Backs Anthropic [Source of Image: Techcrunch.com]
He also underlined how vital safety and transparency are to them; these are not things that a college student would consider when asking an LLM to edit a Wikipedia entry, but they are vital for corporate clients who must be able to document what they are buying and how it is performing for regulators and shareholders.
Furthermore, precisely what are the billions doing? As soon as a company succeeds in compressing one down to the point where it can be utilized for less than a cent a query, the game changes, and a new, more powerful model makes the cheap one look old hat. Well, these models are costly to train, deploy, and run. OpenAI is undoubtedly wasting money by giving away free product usage. While Anthropic is wise enough not to follow suit on the same scale, there is a significant income gap.
According to Anthropic’s internal materials, building its next-generation model, “Claude-Next,” will need spending a billion dollars by the end of 2024.
Spending more money improves both your status and that of your wealthy pals. It may take a while for Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and other companies to stand alone in this space. Still, in the meantime, they will have to fight each other indirectly by spending billions to support innovation where it arises organically.
