We are thrilled to announce that the revolutionary AI startup, Anthropic, is reportedly in the process of closing a massive $750 million funding round, led by venture capital firm Menlo Ventures. This financing round values the company at a staggering $18 billion, making it one of the most valuable AI companies in the market.
2023 has seen an incredible surge of investments in AI startups, with numerous companies achieving multi-billion valuations in a short span of time. Anthropic is an exemplary case of this phenomenon, having been founded in 2021 by the former OpenAI executives, Dario and Daniela Amodei.
What makes Anthropic so remarkable is their development of large language models (LLMs), which are guided by a ‘constitution’ that dictates the behavior of the AI. Their current product, Claude 2, is a sophisticated version of the LLMs already available in the market.
Anthropic’s success has attracted massive investments from tech giants like Google and Amazon, who have agreed to invest up to $2 billion and $4 billion respectively. Along with this investment, Amazon has also given its employees and cloud customers exclusive access to Anthropic’s AI technologies. In addition, Anthropic has also pledged to use Amazon’s cloud services for training its AI models, including Amazon’s Trainium and Inferentia chips.
The company has also managed to receive a $100 million investment from South Korean telecom giant SK Telecom, to develop LLMs tailored to the telecommunications industry. The model will support various languages, including Arabic, English, German, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish.
Time recently named Anthropic’s constitutional AI as one of the top 3 AI innovations of 2023. This AI constitution outlines the desired behavior of the AI, and it is trained to evaluate responses based on their alignment with this constitution. This method was instrumental in the development of Claude, Anthropic’s 2023 response to ChatGPT. Jack Clark, Anthropic’s head of policy, commented on this to Time, saying, “With constitutional AI, you’re explicitly writing down the normative premises with which your model should approach the world. Then the model is training on that.”
In an effort to further explore the possibilities of consensus-building for AI governance, Anthropic also attempted to crowdsource an AI constitution from some 1,000 Americans. The results were promising, indicating potential for the public to get involved in AI governance, in contrast to the current situation of developers setting the rules.
We can’t wait to see what the future holds for Anthropic, and we are excited to follow their journey as they continue to revolutionize the AI industry.
