You’ll see Anthropic in the news this week – and not due to the recently announced ChatGPT rival Claude 2. Amazon has invested $4 Billion USD into the AI research firm, sending Anthropic stock soaring and many asking who is Anthropic? With Claude 2 having impressive performance metrics and a friendly interface, it is no wonder eyes are turning to the company behind this artificial intelligence model. We explain who created Claude, including Daniela Amodei, Nicholas Joseph, and Jack Clark, as well as who funded it prior to Amazon’s AI investment, such as Dustin Moskovitz, James McClave, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
Anthropic – artificial intelligence company explained
Based in San Franciso, Anthropic is an artificial intelligence safety and research company. Founded in 2021 by CEO Dario Amodei and his sister Daniela, former employees of the senior team at OpenAI, Anthropic describes itself as “dedicated to building AI systems that people can rely on and generating research about the opportunities and risks of AI”. Essentially, Anthropic has an ethos of AI safety and the responsible creation and usage of artificial intelligence.
This ethos is one of the reasons that Anthropic is not only an AI startup but a public-benefit corporation. It is a for-profit company that positively impacts society and the global community by conducting AI safety research and ensuring that transformative AI remains non-harmful. The company has the support of tech giants. As opposed to OpenAI, which is backed by Microsoft, Anthropic is supported by Google, which provided a reported $300 million this year at a $4.1 billion valuation. The round was lead by venture capital firm Spark Capital, and also included Salesforce.
Ownership of the firm now includes Amazon, following a substantial $1.25 billion USD investment. On this deal, Amazon reserves the right to later increase their investment to $4 billion USD, should they so choose.
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Anthropic’s projects – Claude AI
Anthropic released its first next-generation AI assistant Claude in March of 2023, with Claude 2 following quickly behind with a release in July. Following their work on GPT-3, the Amodei siblings have developed their own large language model that stands as a rival competitor to ChatGPT.
Although Claude uses a messaging interface where users can submit prompts and receive highly detailed and relevant responses, which is fairly similar to ChatGPT, the difference is that Claude AI is a constitutional chatbot. Essentially, it has been trained to make judgments based on a set of principles taken from documents including the 1948 UN Declaration and Apple’s terms of service, which expands to issues in the digital domain. Claude 2 has complex choice-making capabilities and scored 76.5% on the multiple choice section of the bar exam. While it hasn’t quite had the publicity of the big chatbots ChatGPT, Google Bard, or Bing Chat, it looks like Anthropic might have created a worthy competitor.
At the time of writing, the beta website in which users can try out the model is only available in the US and the UK. In terms of pricing, the chatbot beta is currently free. However, usage of the platform may be limited for unpaid users, and Claude 2 prompts are available to purchase for $11.2 / million tokens. Claude Instant is offered as a less expensive yet equally fast option to Claude.
Final thoughts
It could be concluded that Anthropic seems to be playing a vital and important role in the AI industry. By conducting societal impact research and improving systems with human feedback, Anthropic is protecting the future not just of artificial intelligence, but of society itself. Their current project, Claude 2, is a friendly yet opaque personal assistant chatbot that is helping to make safe AI accessible to a range of people. With comparisons being drawn between Claude 2 and GPT-4, you can read about Claude 2 vs GPT-4 here.
