Anthropic, a San Fransisco based company, founded by Dario Amodei and his sister Daniela, is working to raise as much as $5 billion to take on fellow rival OpenAI and enter over a dozen major industries. This rising company was initially started with $124 million in funding. Recently, the company raised an additional $580 million in series B funding from Sam Bankman-Fried and the folks from FTX.
Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei are both former VP of research at OpenAI and they exited the organization in search of a venture of their own. In May 2021, they formed Anthropic, with the initial focus being mostly on AI safety research. But then, Anthropic quickly shifted their focus to the potential commercial value of their work and that strategy has been paying off.
Google also believes in the potential of Anthropic, investing $300 million into the the company back in early February. In that short amount of time, Anthropic was able to develop their AI chatbot, Claude through a process called “Constitutional AI”.
The growth of Anthropic has lead some to worry about the ‘industrial capture’ of AI technology. With major tech companies such as Google and Microsoft having aggressive moves to control generative AI since OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, the competition is more fierce than ever.
At the same time, open source AI still has a chance to stay competitive. PyTorch 2.0, Lightning 2.0, Lit-LLaMA, Alpaca, Vicuna, Dolly and Hugging Face are just a few of the open source AI that is leading the way. Companies such as Stability AI, who launched Stable Diffusion, are not as well-funded but could still stay competitive.
Despite the competitive landscape, it is important to remember that AI technology is an ever-growing field. As evidenced by the 5,000 strong “Woodstock of AI” moment hosted by Hugging Face, AI technology has the potential to create a great future. Hopefully, AIs like Claude can help us reach the promise of what generative AI technology can do.
