On Friday, Google announced a partnership with Anthropic, a startup founded in 2021. Anthropic created Claude, which like ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence chatbot.
With the $300 million deal, Google will take a roughly 10% stake in the startup, according to reports Financial Times. Anthropic for its part is getting the financial boost and cloud computing resources it needs. The deal could value Anthropic at about $5 billion, the New York Times reported.
Of course, ChatGPT maker OpenAI has Microsoft’s money behind it—lots of it. In the deal revealed last month, Microsoft will invest $10 billion in the startup. It also invested $1 billion in 2019, then quietly added another $2 billion in 2021. The software giant plans to integrate OpenAI technology into various products, including the Bing search engine, possibly disrupting Google’s search dominance.
Both starters share some DNA. Anthropic was formed primarily from a group that broke away from OpenAI after growing disillusioned with strategic and cultural changes. One former OpenAI employee recently told me fortune While OpenAI founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman pay lip service to AI safety, “that often seems like a fig leaf for business issues, but legitimate AI safety issues are being left out.”
Anthropic says it focuses on AI safety – it calls itself an “AI safety and research company” – and shares its research on “Constitutional AI”
With the latter, writing on the website, “We show that language models can learn to follow simple natural language principles through self-improvement, and we use this new method to train safer assistants.”
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has warned about the dangers of advanced AI In December he called ChatGPT “scary,” adding, “We’re not far from AI that’s really dangerous.” He is too tweeted that confidence in the safety of OpenAI “is not high,” noting that, with help from him, “started as open source & non-profit. Nothing is still true.”
fortune OpenAI was reached for comment but did not immediately receive a reply.
Anthropic released a limited test of Claude in January and plans to share it with a wider audience.
“We are partnering with Google Cloud to support the next phase of Anthropic, where we will deploy our AI systems to even more people,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in a statement. “This partnership delivers the performance and scale of cloud infrastructure we need.”
He added, “We are passionate about using Google Cloud infrastructure to build reliable, interpretable, and controllable AI systems.”
Learn how to navigate and build trust in your business with The Trust Factor, a weekly newsletter that examines what leaders need to succeed. Log in here.