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(This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /home4/scienrds/scienceandnerds/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114Source:https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2023\/05\/23\/anthropic-raises-350m-to-build-next-gen-ai-assistants\/<\/a><\/br> Anthropic<\/a>, the prominent generative AI startup co-founded by OpenAI veterans, has raised $450 million in a Series C funding round led by Spark Capital.<\/p>\n Anthropic wouldn\u2019t disclose what the round valued its business at. But The Information reported<\/a> in early March (and as confirmed by us when we were leaked<\/a> the pitch deck for the Series C) that the company was seeking to raise capital at an over-$4.1 billion valuation. It wouldn\u2019t be surprising if that figure ended up being within the ballpark.<\/p>\n Notably, tech giants, including Google (Anthropic\u2019s preferred cloud provider), Salesforce (via its Salesforce Ventures wing) and Zoom (via Zoom Ventures), participated in the financing, alongside Sound Ventures, Menlo Ventures and other undisclosed VC parties. It\u2019d seem to signal a strong belief in the promise of Anthropic\u2019s tech, which uses AI to perform a wide range of conversational and text processing tasks.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are thrilled that these leading investors and technology companies are supporting Anthropic\u2019s mission: AI research and products that put safety at the frontier,\u201d CEO Dario Amodei said in a statement. \u201cThe systems we are building are being designed to provide reliable AI services that can positively impact businesses and consumers now and in the future.\u201d<\/p>\n To wit, Zoom recently announced<\/a> a partnership with Anthropic to \u201cbuild customer-facing AI products focused on reliability, productivity and safety,\u201d following a similar<\/a> tie-up with Google. Anthropic claims to have more than a dozen customers across industries, including healthcare, HR and education.<\/p>\n Perhaps not coincidentally, the Series C also comes after Spark Capital\u2019s hiring of Fraser Kelton, the former head of product at OpenAI, as a venture partner. Spark was an early investor in Anthropic. But the VC firm has redoubled its efforts to seek out early-stage AI startups, particularly in the generative AI space, which remains red hot<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cAll of us at Spark are excited to partner with Dario and the entire Anthropic team on their mission to build reliable and honest AI systems,\u201d Yasmin Razavi, a general partner at Spark Capital who joined Anthropic\u2019s board of directors in connection with the Series C, said in a press release. \u201cAnthropic has assembled a world-class technical team that is dedicated to building safe and capable AI systems. The overwhelmingly positive response to Anthropic\u2019s products and research hints at AI\u2019s broader potential for unlocking a new paradigm of flourishing in our societies.\u201d<\/p>\n With the new $450 million tranche, Anthropic\u2019s war chest stands at a whopping $1.45 billion. That nearly tops the list of the best-funded startups in AI, eclipsed only by OpenAI, which has raised a total of over $11.3 billion to date (according<\/a> to Crunchbase). Competitor Inflection AI<\/a>, a startup building an AI-powered personal assistant, has secured $225 million, while another Anthropic rival, Adept<\/a>, has raised around $415 million.<\/p>\n Amodei, the former VP of research at OpenAI, launched Anthropic in 2021 as a public benefit corporation, taking with him a number of OpenAI employees, including OpenAI\u2019s former policy lead Jack Clark. Amodei split from OpenAI after a disagreement over the company\u2019s direction, namely the startup\u2019s increasingly commercial focus.<\/p>\n Anthropic now competes with OpenAI as well as startups like\u00a0Cohere<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0AI21 Labs<\/a>, all of which are developing and productizing their own text-generating \u2014 and in some cases image-generating \u2014 AI systems. But it has grander ambitions.<\/p>\n As TechCrunch previously reported<\/a>, Anthropic plans to \u2014 as it describes in a pitch deck to investors \u2014 create a \u201cnext-gen algorithm for AI self-teaching.\u201d Such an algorithm could be used to build virtual assistants that can answer emails, perform research and generate art, books and more, some of which we\u2019ve already gotten a taste of with the likes of GPT-4<\/a>\u00a0and other large language models.<\/p>\n The next-gen algorithm is the successor to Claude<\/a>, Anthropic\u2019s chatbot, still in preview but available through an API, that can be instructed to perform a range of tasks, including searching across documents, summarizing, writing and coding and answering questions about particular topics. In these ways, it\u2019s similar to OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT. But Anthropic makes the case that Claude, released in March, is \u201cmuch less likely to produce harmful outputs,\u201d \u201ceasier to converse with\u201d and \u201c[far] more steerable\u201d than the alternatives.<\/p>\n Why\u2019s Claude superior in Anthropic\u2019s view? In the pitch deck, Anthropic argues that its technique for training AI, called \u201cconstitutional AI<\/a>,\u201d makes the behavior of systems both easier to understand and simpler to adjust as needed by imbuing systems with \u201cvalues\u201d defined by a \u201cconstitution.\u201d Constitutional AI basically seeks to provide a way to align AI with human intentions<\/a>, allowing systems to respond to questions and perform tasks using a simple set of guiding principles.<\/p>\n In its quest toward generative AI superiority, Anthropic recently<\/a> expanded the context window \u2014 essentially, Claude\u2019s \u201cmemory\u201d \u2014 from 9,000 tokens to 100,000 tokens, with \u201ctokens\u201d representing parts of words. With perhaps the largest context window of any public AI model, Claude can converse relatively coherently for hours \u2014 even days \u2014 as opposed to minutes and digest and analyze hundreds of pages of documents.<\/p>\n That progress doesn\u2019t come cheap.<\/p>\n Anthropic estimates that its next-gen model will require on the order of 10^25 FLOPs, or floating point operations \u2014 several orders of magnitude larger than even the largest models today. Of course, how this translates to computation time depends on the speed and scale of the system doing the computation. But Anthropic implies (in the deck) that it relies on clusters with \u201ctens of thousands of GPUs\u201d and that it\u2019ll require roughly a billion dollars in spending over the next 18 months.<\/p>\n
\nAnthropic raises $450M to build next-gen AI assistants<\/br>
\n2023-05-23 22:18:01<\/br><\/p>\n