• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, February 5, 2023

Google’s partnership with artificial intelligence (AI) firm Anthropic as a preferred cloud provider, announced Friday, includes a financial investment, very similar to Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI.

While the post on the Google Cloud blog did not mention Google’s financial investment, a report from the Financial Times said Google confirmed the $300 million investment, which gives it a 10% stake in Anthropic.

The investment follows Microsoft’s more than $10 billion investment in OpenAI, the artificial intelligence firm creator of ChatGPT, a chatbot that offers conversational capabilities.

“Google Cloud intends to build large-scale, next-generation TPU and GPU clusters that Anthropic plans to use to train and deploy its cutting-edge AI systems,” the company wrote.

The search company’s investment echoes the $1 billion “cash-for-computing investment” that Microsoft made in OpenAI three years ago, The Financial Times reported.

The start-up had raised more than $700 million before Google’s investment in late 2022.

The FT says the major difference between the investments of the two companies, Google and Microsoft, is: that "while Microsoft has sought to integrate OpenAI’s technology into many of its own services, Google’s relationship with Anthropic is limited to acting as the company’s tech supplier in what has become an AI arm’s race, according to people familiar with the arrangement.”

Anthropic was founded in 2021, by a group of researchers led by Dario Amodei, who left OpenAI after a disagreement over the company’s direction. The concern points to 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.