AI Research Startup anthropic it aims to raise up to $5 billion over the next two years to take on rival OpenAI and enter more than a dozen major industries, according to company documents obtained by TechCrunch.
A pitch deck for Anthropic’s C-series fundraising round reveals these and other long-term goals for the company, which was founded in 2020 by former OpenAI researchers.
On the platform, Anthropic says it plans to build a “frontier model,” tentatively named “Claude-Next,” 10 times more capable than today’s most powerful AI, but will require $1 billion in spending over the next 18 months. .
Information reported in early March that Anthropic was looking to raise $300 million at a valuation of $4.1 billion, bringing its total gross to $1.3 billion. The deck confirms that target number, even though only half of it was raised at the time the document was created from a “confidential investor.”
Anthropic describes the border model as a “next-generation algorithm for AI self-learning,” referencing an AI training technique it developed called “constitutional AI.” At a high level, constitutional AI seeks to provide a way of align AI with human intentions — enable systems to answer questions and perform tasks using a simple set of guiding principles.
Anthropic estimates that their frontier model will require on the order of 10^25 FLOPs, or floating point operations, several orders of magnitude larger than even today’s largest models. of courseHow this translates to computation time depends on the speed and scale of the system doing the computation; Anthropic implies (in the platform) that it is based on clusters with “tens of thousands of GPUs”.
This frontier model could be used to build virtual assistants that can answer emails, conduct research, generate art, books, and more, some of which we’ve already tested with GPT-4 and other large language models.
“These models could begin to automate large portions of the economy,” the pitch deck reads. “We think that the companies that train the best models in 2025/26 will be too far ahead for anyone to catch up in later cycles.”
The Frontier Model is the successor to Claude, Anthropic’s chatbot that can be told to perform a variety of tasks including searching through documents, summarizing, writing and coding, and answering questions on particular topics. In this way, it is similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. But Anthropic argues that Claude is, thanks to Constitutional AI, “much less likely to produce harmful results,” “easier to converse with,” and “more manageable.”
Anthropic released Claude commercially in March following a closed beta late last year, allowing initial access by around 15 partners. Count among your beta users and potential customers the following industries (with the asterisk indicating that a human is in the loop to oversee the model):
- Summary and analysis of legal documents*
- Medical Patient Records and Analysis*
- Emails and chat customer service
- Coding models for consumers and B2B
- Productivity related search, document editing and content generation*
- Chatbot for public Q&A and advice
- Search using natural language responses
- HR tasks such as job descriptions and interview analysis*
- therapy and training
- virtual assistants*
- Education at all levels*
Dario Amodei, the former vice president of research at OpenAI, launched Anthropic in 2021 as a public benefit corporation, taking several OpenAI employees with him, including former OpenAI policy lead Jack Clark. Amodei parted ways with OpenAI after a disagreement over the company’s direction, namely the startup’s increasingly commercial focus.
Anthropic now competes with OpenAI, as well as startups like Cohere and AI21 Labs, all of which are developing and producing their own text-generating and, in some cases, image-generating AI systems.
“Anthropic has been very research-focused for the first year and a half of its existence, but we have become convinced of the need for commercialization, which we fully committed to in September. [2022]says the pitch deck. “We have developed a strategy for go-to-market and initial product specialization that aligns with our core expertise, brand, and where we see adoption occurring in the next 12 months.”
The pitch deck reveals that Alameda Research Ventures, the sister firm of Sam Bankman-Fried’s collapsed cryptocurrency firm FTX, was a “silent investor” in Anthropic with “non-voting” shares, responsible for spearheading the Series B round. of $580 million from Anthropic. Anthropic expects the Alameda shares to be disposed of in bankruptcy proceedings in the coming years.
Google is also among Anthropic’s investors, having pledged $300 million in Anthropic for a 10% stake in the startup. Under the terms of the agreement, which was first reported Per the Financial Times, Anthropic agreed to make Google Cloud its “cloud provider of choice” with the companies “co-developing[ing] AI computer systems”.
Other Anthropic backers include James McClave, Facebook and Asana co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and Skype founding engineer Jaan Tallinn.
