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Anthropic, the OpenAI rival founded by ex-OpenAI employees, is in talks to raise a $750 million round of funding led by Menlo Ventures, a person with direct knowledge of the matter told CNBC.
According to the source, the round will value Anthropic at up to $18.4 billion — about 4.5 times the startup’s $4.1 billion valuation earlier this year.
The news of the fundraising was first reported by The Information. Anthropic declined to comment for this story.
Founded in 2021 and funded by companies including Google, Salesforce and Zoom, Anthropic had already raised a combined $750 million from two funding rounds in April and May, one of which included Google taking a 10% stake in the company. According to PitchBook data, Anthropic’s May funding was at the time the largest artificial intelligence company funding round since Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI in January.
In October, Google agreed to invest up to $2 billion in the startup, a commitment that included a $500 million upfront cash investment and an additional $1.5 billion over time.
Anthropic is the developer of Cloud 2, a rival chatbot to OpenAI’s ChatGPT that is used by companies sales force-Owned Slack, Notion, and Quora. Claude 2 has the ability to produce summaries of up to 75,000 words, which can be equivalent to the length of a book. Users can input large data sets and ask for a summary in the form of a memo, letter, or story. In contrast, ChatGPT can handle about 3,000 words.
Anthropic was founded by Dario Amodei, former vice president of research at OpenAI, and his sister Daniela Amodei, who was OpenAI’s vice president of security and policy. Several other OpenAI research alumni were also on Anthropic’s founding team.
Research conducted by machine learning monitoring platform Arthur AI tested chatbots from Anthropic, Meta, Foghere, and OpenAI and found that Cloud 2 is the most reliable chatbot in terms of “self-awareness,” meaning what it does. Makes an accurate assessment of what works and what doesn’t. It doesn’t know, and is only answering questions, it had training data to support it.
Daniela Amodei told CNBC in July that Anthropic invested at least two months developing its latest chatbot, with a team of 30 to 35 people working directly on the AI models and a total of 150 people supporting it. Were staying. He said that the market is growing so fast that there is a lot of scope for many players to succeed.
Amodei said at the time, “This is really an unusual time from a business perspective because there is a lot of demand for larger language models and the demand is far beyond what the industry can currently provide.” “The landscape is very broad, and there is really quite a bit of room for many different users and types of users to use these systems.”
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