AI developer Anthropic is said to have acquired $2 billion in investment money from Google. Combined with Amazon’s earlier investment, Anthropic is gaining prestige in the AI field.
Anthropic is reportedly receiving money from Google for the second time this year. Earlier this year, the investment counted $450 million, and now more money, a total of $2 billion, seems to follow. The Wall Street Journal is aware of this investment, reporting from sources involved in the deal.
Cautiously explored
The AI developer now appears to have successfully passed Google’s trial period. Contributing to the good report will have been the publicly disclosed investment from Amazon, which seems doubly confident with an investment counting up to four billion dollars.
Read also: Amazon invests $4 billion in Anthropic for better AI proposition
As we wrote earlier, Anthropic’s strength lies in clearly envisioning its target audience. Its AI tools have interesting tools specifically for the business market. Funding should allow it to expand that offering, including a more powerful successor to the LLM Claude 2.
In addition, Anthropic made another breakthrough this month in researching how neural networks (NN) work. This technology supports AI applications and is being studied by Anthropic to prevent hallucinations of AI tools.
Also read: How Anthropic is unraveling the mysteries of neural networks
Will Google get the scraps?
The developments seem to have convinced Google. According to sources, the company is investing $500 million immediately, while a further $1.5 billion will be distributed over an extended period. It is unclear what Google will get in return now that the investment is not publicly disclosed. In any case, it can no longer become the AI player’s main cloud provider, as AWS has already secured that position.
Although Google already had a foothold within Anthropic with a tentative investment, Amazon seems to have snatched the main position. However, it will still have been the safest and most logical option for Google to join forces with Anthropic at this point. After all, the competitor’s camp, which is OpenAI, is already occupied by Microsoft. Betting money on a new player would then again be a risk. While trying out a new player puts Google further behind the competition.
Perhaps the search giant has long gambled on the latter option: making itself a competitor to OpenAI and Anthropic. Currently, developing an LLM and associated AI tools is an enormous cost. Therefore, developing in-house involves financial risk, while those who do not invest enough cannot play at the level of OpenAI and Anthropic. So that doesn’t sound very promising either.