Anthropic, emerging as a formidable contender to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other generative AI models, is reportedly gearing up for a significant funding boost. According to a source familiar with the situation, the company, established by former OpenAI employees, is negotiating to secure a $750 million investment, with Menlo Ventures leading the round. This funding effort could propel Anthropic’s valuation to an impressive $18.4 billion, marking a substantial increase from its $4.1 billion valuation earlier in the year, as reported by CNBC.
The company, which was founded in 2021, has attracted investment from major players like Google, Salesforce, and Zoom. Anthropic has already successfully raised $750 million across two funding rounds in April and May. Notably, one of these rounds included Google acquiring a 10% share in the firm. The May funding was particularly significant, as it was the largest AI company funding round since Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI, as per PitchBook data.
In a notable move in October, Google committed to investing up to $2 billion in Anthropic. This agreement included an initial $500 million cash injection, supplemented by an additional $1.5 billion pledged over an extended period.
Anthropic has made waves with the development of Claude 2, a chatbot that directly competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Claude 2, used by companies like Slack (owned by Salesforce), Notion, and Quora, boasts the capacity to summarize content up to 75,000 words — equivalent to a full-length book. This feature enables users to input extensive data and request summaries in various formats, such as memos, letters, or stories. In comparison, ChatGPT can process about 3,000 words.
The founding of Anthropic was led by Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s ex-vice president of research, and his sister, Daniela Amodei, previously OpenAI’s vice president of safety and policy. They were joined by several other OpenAI research alumni in founding the company. A study conducted by Arthur AI, a machine learning monitoring platform, placed Claude 2 at the forefront for reliability and “self-awareness” among chatbots from Anthropic, Meta, Cohere, and OpenAI. This quality refers to the chatbot’s ability to accurately assess its knowledge limits and respond based on its training data.
Daniela Amodei disclosed to CNBC in July that the development of their latest chatbot involved a dedicated team of 30 to 35 people working on the AI model, supported by an overall team of 150. She emphasized the rapid growth of the market, suggesting ample opportunities for multiple players to thrive in this burgeoning field.
