• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, October 28, 2023

Google stepped up an investment in artificial intelligence (AI) startup Anthropic, fueling the race to align with emerging companies to find the next big breakthrough.

The initial investment of $500 billion is a precursor to another $1.5 billion over time, according to one report.

Google previously invested $300 million in the company for a 10% stake in April. That same month, Google confirmed it had made an investment and it had a large cloud contract with Anthropic.

Anthropic, founded in 2021, is the developer of Claude 2, a chatbot rival to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Slack, Notion, and Quora use its technology.

The company has also received funding from Amazon, Salesforce, and Zoom.

These investments from Google, Amazon and others trickle down to advertisers in the development of products and services.

In Amazon’s case, it will provide customers with compute infrastructures through AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips and AI training models.

One company, LexisNexis Legal & Professional, a global provider of information and analytics, uses custom Claude 2 models through Amazon to deliver conversational search, insightful summarization, and intelligent legal drafting capabilities via the company’s new Lexis+ AI solution. 

Anthropic's Claude 2 can summarize about 75,000 words. Users input large data sets and ask for summaries in the form of a memo, letter or story. It is estimated that ChatGPT can handle about 3,000 words.

In September, Anthropic announced an investment from Amazon of about $4 billion. The agreement is part of a broader collaboration to develop the “most reliable and high-performing foundation models in the industry.”

Together with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Anthropic said it would focus on safety research and products to run a secure, reliable infrastructure. Through the partnership, AWS became Anthropic’s primary cloud provider for critical workloads.

A group of researchers led by Dario Amodei left OpenAI after a disagreement over the company’s direction, and then founded Anthropic.

The researchers were concerned that Microsoft’s first investment in OpenAI would set it on a more commercial path and detract from its original focus on the safety of advanced AI.