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Anthropic, an OpenAI rival founded by former OpenAI employees, is in talks to raise $750 million in a funding round led by Menlo Ventures, a person with direct knowledge of the matter told CNBC. .
The round is expected to value Anthropic at up to $18.4 billion, nearly 4.5 times the startup’s $4.1 billion valuation earlier this year, according to people familiar with the matter.
News of the fundraising event was previously reported; information. Anthropic declined to comment for this story.
Founded in 2021 and backed by companies like Google, Salesforce, and Zoom, Anthropic has already raised a total of $750 million in two funding rounds in April and May. , one of which was funded by Google. 10% stock At work. At the time, Anthropic’s May funding was the largest funding round for an artificial intelligence company since Microsoft invested in OpenAI in January, according to PitchBook data.
In October, Google agreed to invest up to $2 billion in the startup, with $500 million upfront and a commitment to invest another $1.5 billion over the long term.
Anthropic is the developer of Claude 2, a chatbot that rivals OpenAI’s ChatGPT and is used by the following companies: sales force-Owned by Slack, Notion, and Quora. Claude 2 has the ability to summarize up to approximately 75,000 words, which is the equivalent of a book. Users can enter large data sets and ask for summaries in the form of notes, letters, or stories. In contrast, ChatGPT can process around 3,000 words.
Anthropic was founded by Dario Amodei, former VP of Research at OpenAI, and his sister Daniela Amodei, VP of Safety and Policy at OpenAI. Several other alumni of his OpenAI research also joined his Anthropic founding team.
A study by Arthur AI, a machine learning monitoring platform, tested chatbots from Anthropic, Meta, Cohere, and OpenAI and found Claude 2 to be the most reliable chatbot in terms of “self-awareness.” That means measuring exactly what you do and what you don’t do. I don’t know, so I only answered questions that had supporting training data.
Daniela Amodei told CNBC in July that Anthropic invested at least two months into developing its latest chatbot, with a team of 30 to 35 people working directly on the AI model and a total of 150 people supporting it. He said he was there. She said the market is growing so quickly that there is plenty of room for multiple players to succeed.
“These are really unusual times from a business perspective because there is so much demand for large-scale language models, more demand than the industry can currently provide,” Amodei said at the time. “The landscape is very broad, and there’s really a lot of room for different users and types of users to utilize these systems.”
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