| By Loc Le |
After investing $300 million in Anthropic in late 2022 for a 10% stake in the company, Google has recently reached an agreement for another investment of up to $2 billion. According to a spokesperson from Anthropic, Google’s investment includes an upfront investment of $500 million while the remaining $1.5 billion will be invested over time. This investment supports Google’s ambition of implementing AI all throughout the company as Thomas Kurian, the CEO of Google Cloud, said that their “focus is on putting gen AI tools into the hands of everyone across the organization – from IT to operations to security to the board room.”
Founded by former executives from OpenAI which created ChatGPT, Dario and Daniela Amodei launched Anthropic in 2021 with a goal “to make the fundamental research advances that will let us build more capable, general, and reliable AI systems, then deploy these systems in a way that benefits people.” Since their inception, the company has become a prominent player in the AI development industry and has received financial support from not only Google, but also Amazon, who they reached an agreement with in September 2023 for an investment of up to $4 billion, Salesforce, and Zoom. In July 2023, Anthropic also launched Claude 2 which is an AI chatbot that serves as a direct competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
In comparison to ChatGPT, Claude 2 appears to have numerous benefits that gives it the edge over the widely used AI chatbot. For example, Claude 2 is capable of handling up to approximately 75,000 words while ChatGPT can only handle up to about 3,000 words. Furthermore, Claude 2 has the ability to process large data sets and can return summaries in the form of a memo, letter, or story. In addition to being trained with Constitutional AI to help it avoid outputs that may be harmful or unethical, Claude 2 was also trained with data as recent as summer 2023 while ChatGPT’s data only goes up until summer 2021. Claude 2 also performs faster as it has an average response time of 5 seconds compared to ChatGPT’s response time that can take up to 30 seconds and possibly longer during periods of high traffic.
Although AI chatbots such as Claude 2 and ChatGPT have only scratched the surface of what the technology can do, tech giants such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft clearly see that AI is the key to propelling them and society into a promising future where technology is seamlessly integrated into our everyday lives. With their substantial investment into Anthropic, Google has demonstrated how they, and other cloud companies, are racing to form strategic partnerships with AI development companies. Given its wide range of uses and capabilities that have yet to be explored, the prospect of what AI can ultimately become is truly exciting. And with continued support from large tech companies, the world may be able to experience those possibilities sooner than we might think.