Google LLC today announced a $300 million investment in Anthropic, a startup that researches and develops “reliable and controllable” artificial intelligence systems, as part of the search giant’s foray into generative AI, one of today’s hottest areas of technology.
Google will receive a 10% stake in Anthropic as part of the agreement. In addition, the company will purchase cloud computing resources through a “preferred provider” partnership with Google Cloud.
Google Cloud also plans to build its own large-scale, application-specific AI-accelerator tensor processing unit and graphics processing unit clusters, which Anthropic will use to train and deploy its AI models.
Generative AI refers to artificial intelligence algorithms that can generate text, images, and other media from plain-language user prompts. Following the launch of OpenAI LLC’s ChatGPT last year, which is capable of answering questions almost like a person, the technology has captured the hearts and minds of millions of people and generated headlines.
Anthropic was founded in January 2021 by a group of researchers, engineers, policy experts, and others who have worked on AI breakthroughs such as the large language model GPT-3, which powers ChatGPT. There is also human feedback reinforcement learning, which allows machine learning models to quickly learn to become more conversational based on positive or negative feedback.
The company’s focus is on AI safety, with the goal of developing more predictable, reliable, and steerable AI systems. The collaborative team hopes to eliminate bias in the AI model and overcome some of the current limitations of conversational AI.
Google will gain access to Anthropic’s flagship conversational assistant AI product, Claude, as a result of this collaboration. It’s an intelligent agent chatbot that understands and responds to natural language, similar to how conversational AI models like ChatGPT work, but it’s only available in closed beta through a Slack integration right now.
