Negotiations are underway for Anthropic, a competitor of OpenAI created by ex-employees of the latter, to secure a $750 million investment led by Menlo Ventures. This would boost the startup's worth up to a valuation of $18.4 billion, a dramatic increase from the $4.1 billion that it earned in April. On top of that, it has already raised $750 million from April and May, and Google has pledged to invest up to $2 billion in the near future.
Anthropic, the OpenAI rival founded by former employees, is reportedly in talks to raise a $750 million funding round led by Menlo Ventures, which would value the startup at up to $18.4 billion. This is nearly 4.5 times the $4.1 billion Anthropic was valued at earlier this year. The news was initially reported by The Information, and Anthropic declined to comment.
Since 2021, Anthropic has been funded by Google, Salesforce and Zoom, and has raised a combined $750 million from two funding rounds in April and May. The latter saw Google taking a 10% ownership stake in the startup. Anthropic's May fundraise was the largest AI company funding round since Microsoft's investment in OpenAI in January, according to PitchBook data.
In October, Google agreed to invest up to $2 billion in Anthropic, encompassing a $500 million upfront payment and an additional $1.5 billion to be invested in the future. The startup developed Claude 2, a rival chatbot to OpenAI's ChatGPT, which businesses like Slack, Notion and Quora use. Claude 2 has the capacity to summarize up to about 75,000 words, while ChatGPT can handle around 3,000.
Anthropic is the brainchild of Dario Amodei, OpenAI's former Vice President of Research, and his sister Daniela Amodei, who was OpenAI's Vice President of Safety and Policy. Several other ex-OpenAI research specialists comprise Anthropic's founding team.
Research by Arthur AI, a machine learning monitoring platform, tested chatbots from the likes of Anthropic, Meta, Cohere and OpenAI, and found that Claude 2 was the most dependable in terms of "self-awareness," which includes accurately gauging what it knows and doesn't know, and only responding to questions it was trained to answer.
In July, Daniela Amodei told CNBC that Anthropic allocated at least two months towards developing its newest chatbot, with a team of 30 - 35 personnel working directly on the AI model along with 150 people supporting it. Amodei said the chatbot market is growing so quickly that there's plenty of space for multiple players to flourish.
"It's a really peculiar period from a business perspective because there's such lots of demand for large language models and greater demand than the industry can currently provide," she said. "The landscape is just very wide, and there is indeed a lot of room for many types of users to use these systems."
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