Search giant Google has pledged to invest $2 billion in OpenAI rival AI startup Anthropic. According to reports, the latest investment is separate from Google’s $550 million investment in Anthropic earlier this year.
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The new Amazon investment is structured as a convertible note, a type of debt that can be converted into equity in the next round of funding, Bloomberg reported, citing Anthropic as its source. The report notes that Google has already invested $500 million in the company and has committed to investing a further $1.5 billion in the future.
Interestingly, prior to Google’s latest round of investment in Anthropic, the tech giant had already signed a Google Cloud deal worth over $3 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Anthropic has also signed a multi-year deal with Google Cloud worth more than $3 billion, said a person familiar with the matter. The deal was signed a few months before the new investment.
Earlier, Amazon pledged to invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic as it seeks to compete with other cloud companies in AI. In a quarterly filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission this week, quoted by Reuters, Amazon had detailed that it had invested $1.25 billion in the AI startup, which can be converted into equity, and its ability to invest $2.75 billion in a second note expires in the first quarter of 2024.
Anthropic’s founders, siblings Dario and Dniela Amodei, worked as engineers at OpenAI before launching their own company in 2021. The WSJ report notes that the siblings had a dispute with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman over the safe development of artificial intelligence.
Anthropic, which was previously funded by FTX’s Sam Bankman Fried, but after the crypto exchange’s famous failure, Anthropic sought other investors, which included cloud giants such as Amazon and Google, as well as traditional Silicon Valley investors such as Spark Capital and Menlo Ventures, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The WSJ report notes that Anthropic, which operates a generative AI-based chatbot called Claude similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, needs billions of dollars to train more advanced versions of its AI system. The company has secured $7 billion in funding this year alone.
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Updated: 28 Oct 2023, 09:24 AM IST