Google will be investing $2 billion USD in Anthropic, a competitor to OpenAI, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The company reportedly invested $500 million USD upfront and committed to invest an additional $1.5 million USD over time, though the length of that period wasn’t disclosed. Google had previously invested $550 million USD into Anthropic.
Last month, Amazon made an even bigger commitment to Anthropic with a $4 billion USD investment. As part of the investment, Amazon Web Services was deemed Anthropic’s primary cloud provider. Other primary investors include Salesforce and Zoom.
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former employees at OpenAI who had severed ties with the company over AI safety precautions. In March, Anthropic launched its Claude chatbot, putting it in direct competition with OpenAI’s own ChatGPT. A follow-up chatbot, Claude 2, arrived in July and is capable of summarizing 75,000 words of text into a memo, letter or story.
Summarization capabilities aside, Claude has also been lauded by some as being more reliable than ChatGPT – the bot will flat-out tell you if it doesn’t know the answer to a question rather than providing a response that could potentially contain misinformation.
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