Highlights:

  • Anthropic was established in January 2021 by academics, engineers, policy analysts, and other professionals with knowledge of AI innovations like the GPT-3 large language model, which underpins ChatGPT.
  • The team believes that bias can be removed by doing this, and one of conversational AI’s major limitations can be overcome.

Anthropic, a San Francisco-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) startup, has closed on another round of funding worth USD 300 million just a month after raising hundreds of millions of dollars from Google LLC. Spark Capital led the round, which increased Anthropic’s valuation to USD 4.1 billion.

Google reportedly invested USD 300 million in the startup last February. According to the Financial Times, Google acquired a 10% stake in the company just two weeks after Microsoft Corp. invested USD 10 billion in ChatGPT creator OpenAI LLC.

Anthropic was established in January 2021 by academics, engineers, policy analysts, and other professionals with knowledge of AI innovations like the GPT-3 large language model, which underpins ChatGPT. Its team is also an expert in reinforcement learning from human feedback. It enables machine learning models to quickly pick up on positive or negative feedback and learn to become more conversational.

The startup is committed to ensuring the safety of AI and is working to create more dependable, steerable systems that produce more predictable outcomes. The team believes that bias can be removed by doing this, and one of conversational AI’s major limitations can be overcome.

Anthropic’s AI chatbot, Claude, is only available in closed beta. Still, a paper outlining its objectives notes that it is anticipated to counter negative prompts by highlighting how risky or misguided they are.

Anthropic had already raised USD 704 million through Series A and B rounds in 2022, making it extremely well-funded even before this year. Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the now-discredited FTX cryptocurrency exchange, led the Series B round.

Anthropic is extremely overvalued despite making little money, reflecting the incredible fervor created by the rise of so-called generative AI, sparked by the success of ChatGPT last year. When users request it, generative AI can produce text, images, and other media types using AI algorithms.

Years of study have been put into this area, and the work is starting to bear fruit. Analysts predict that ChatGPT’s capabilities will be useful in a wide range of applications and may even compete with Google LLC in online searches.

This week, venture capital firms have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in generative AI startups. A new USD 250 million fund has been announced by Salesforce Ventures, the venture capital division of Salesforce Inc., to fund promising generative AI startups. It intends to invest in four businesses: Anthropic, Hearth.AI, Cohere Inc., and SuSea Inc., the company that founded the You.com website for natural language search.

The conversational AI startup Amelia LLC, based in New York, announced this week that it had raised USD 175 million through BuildGroup and Monroe Capital. In addition, Humane Inc., also based in New York and a partner of OpenAI, announced that it had raised USD 100 million.