Rumor has it that Google has agreed to invest up to $2 billion in OpenAI competitor Anthropic

On October 28th, according to sources familiar with the matter, Google has agreed to invest up to $2 billion in OpenAI competitor Anthropic on top of its previous investment. This move may prompt startups in the field of artificial intelligence to intensify competition in order to achieve the next major breakthrough first

On October 28th, according to sources familiar with the matter, Google has agreed to invest up to $2 billion in OpenAI competitor Anthropic on top of its previous investment. This move may prompt startups in the field of artificial intelligence to intensify competition in order to achieve the next major breakthrough first.

According to insiders, Google has agreed to invest $500 million in Anthropic in advance and has agreed to add another $1.5 billion over time. Prior to this investment, Amazon also promised to invest $4 billion in Anthropic last month. Anthropic was founded by a former OpenAI engineer in 2021, with the goal of developing generative artificial intelligence models that can compete with GPT-4.

Earlier this year, Google's parent company Alphabet had invested $550 million in Anthropic.

Google's investment has not been reported before, and this is the latest agreement reached between technology giants and artificial intelligence startups that require billions of dollars to train more advanced artificial intelligence systems. This reflects the excitement among technology giants about forming alliances with promising startups, who are trying to seize the opportunity of ChatGPT's success and develop their own artificial intelligence audio, text, and image technologies.

According to a person familiar with the matter, a few months prior to the signing of this new investment agreement, Aerospace also signed a multi-year agreement worth over $3 billion with Google's cloud computing department.

In January of this year, Microsoft signed a landmark $10 billion investment agreement, building on its previous $3 billion investment and acquiring a 49% stake in ChatGPT chat robot developer OpenAI. At that time, OpenAI promised to use Microsoft's Azure cloud platform to train its artificial intelligence models.

There are currently three major suppliers in the field of on-demand computing, namely Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, who are increasingly forming alliances with either Antiopic or OpenAI, as these two startups' future artificial intelligence models are the most attractive.

The founders of Anthropic are Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei siblings. Two years ago, after a dispute with Ultraman over how to safely develop artificial intelligence, the two left OpenAI.

Since then, in order to obtain the training resources and strong financial resources needed to become a leader in this technology, Antiopic has been fiercely competing with OpenAI. Anthropic has launched an artificial intelligence assistant called Claude to compete with ChatGPT and has also sold similar tools to businesses.

The two huge transactions reached by Anthropic with Amazon and Google mean that it has raised nearly $7 billion in funds in the past year alone. The company has also reached long-term agreements with Amazon and Google to train and run its models.

Anthropic was mainly supported by FTX, a subsidiary of Sam Bankman Fried, until the cryptocurrency exchange collapsed last year, forcing it to seek other supporters. The company has sought help from cloud computing giants and more traditional Silicon Valley investors such as SparkCapital and Menlo Ventures. Earlier this year, the company's valuation reached $4 billion.

Anthropic told investors that its position as a leader in the artificial intelligence competition may be confirmed as early as next year and outlined a beautiful future: its artificial intelligence tools may bring virtual assistants, smarter search engines, and more advanced content generation, such as movie scripts and video games.

In order to catch up with Amazon and Microsoft in the lucrative cloud computing market, Google has placed a heavy bet in the field of artificial intelligence, hoping that this new software can encourage corporate customers to increase expenses.

Since Alphabet announced lower than expected sales growth for Google Cloud in its third quarter financial report released on Tuesday, the company's stock price has fallen by more than 10%, dampening people's enthusiasm for the department's promotion of artificial intelligence. Google executives stated on an analyst conference call that some customers have recently reduced their expenses, but the company will continue to actively invest in cloud services.

In addition to Anthropic, Google has also invested in artificial intelligence startups Runway (a video production tool manufacturer) and HuggingFace (an open source software service company). Google has also invested heavily in developing its own complex artificial intelligence system, including an unpublished algorithm called Gemini, which it hopes will directly compete with ChatGPT's technology. (Small)