Complex forecast topic: See how that startup is growing into public company
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☑️ #31 January 7, 2025
AI Startup Anthropic Raising Funding Valuing It at $60 Billion
wsj.com: [Excerpt] Amazon-backed OpenAI rival was valued at $18 billion last year.
Much of Anthropic’s funding to date has come from its close partner Amazon, which committed $4 billion to the startup in November, bringing its total investment since 2023 to $8 billion. Amazon’s November investment was a convertible note, meaning it will translate to equity at the valuation set in the current round.
Anthropic develops and operates its technology in data centers operated by Amazon and Google, which has also invested billions of dollars in the startup.
Venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners is leading the funding round.
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☑️ #30 Nov 22, 2024
Powering the next generation of AI development with AWS
anthropic.com: [Excerpts] Today we’re announcing an expansion of our collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS), deepening our work together to develop and deploy advanced AI systems. This expanded partnership includes a new $4 billion investment from Amazon and establishes AWS as our primary cloud and training partner. This will bring Amazon's total investment in Anthropic to $8 billion, while maintaining their position as a minority investor.
Claude as core infrastructure
Through Amazon Bedrock, Claude has become core infrastructure for tens of thousands of companies seeking reliable, practical AI solutions at scale. Pfizer uses the latest Claude models in Amazon Bedrock to accelerate research and delivery timelines for critical medicines, while saving tens of millions in operational costs. Intuit uses Claude in Amazon Bedrock to explain complex tax calculations for millions of users during tax season. Perplexity, an AI-powered search engine, delivers more accurate responses at twice the speed by using Claude in Amazon Bedrock, and the European Parliament leverages Claude to power ‘Archibot’, making 2.1 million official documents instantly searchable and easier to analyze in multiple languages while reducing research time by 80%.
It doesn’t explain what the product is (it’s not even clear that it’s a product).
Fully relies on insider knowledge of AI-space to make any sense.
Most people don’t know .ai is a domain extension.
Weird copy with no personality.
No emotional or practical appeal.
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@alexkehr: They should just directly compare with ChatGPT. Stuff like: - “Claude is more useful than ChatGPT” - “Think ChatGPT is smart? Try Claude” - “ChatGPT is good. Claude is better”.
Why is this new capability important? A vast amount of modern work happens via computers. Enabling AIs to interact directly with computer software in the same way people do will unlock a huge range of applications that simply aren’t possible for the current generation of AI assistants.
Over the last few years, many important milestones have been reached in the development of powerful AI—for example, the ability to perform complex logical reasoning and the ability to see and understand images. The next frontier is computer use: AI models that don’t have to interact via bespoke tools, but that instead are empowered to use essentially any piece of software as instructed.
@dpkingma: Personal news: I'm joining @AnthropicAI! Anthropic's approach to AI development resonates significantly with my own beliefs; looking forward to contributing to Anthropic's mission of developing powerful AI systems responsibly. Can't wait to work with their talented team, including a number of great ex-colleagues from OpenAI and Google, and tackle the challenges ahead!
🔹Related content:
dpkingma.com: [Excerpt] I do research on scalable methods for machine learning, with a focus on generative models. My contributions include the Variational Autoencoder (VAE), the Adam optimizer, Glow, and Variational Diffusion Models, but please see Scholar for a more complete list. I obtained a PhD (cum laude) from University of Amsterdam in 2017, and was part of the founding team of OpenAI in 2015. Before that, I co-founded Advanza which got acquired in 2016. My formal name is Diederik, but have the Frysian nickname Durk (pronounced like Dirk).
2018 - 2024: Research Scientist at Google Brain / DeepMind. Lead of various research projects, mostly generative models for text, image and video.
2015 - 2018: Part of founding team and Research Scientist at OpenAI (San Francisco). Lead of the Algorithms team, focused on basic research.
2013 - 2017: Ph.D. (cum laude) at University of Amsterdam, advised by Max Welling, on the topic of deep learning and generative models. Thesis: Variational Inference and Deep Learning: A New Synthesis. Spent summers of 2014/2015 at DeepMind for collaborations.
2010 - 2012: Co-founder and technical lead at Advanza, successful exit in 2016.
2009 and 2012: Jr. Research Scientist at New York University, Yann LeCun's lab.
U.S. AI Safety Institute Signs Agreements Regarding AI Safety Research, Testing and Evaluation With Anthropic and OpenAI
nist.gov: [Excerpt] These first-of-their-kind agreements between the U.S. government and industry will help advance safe and trustworthy AI innovation for all.
GAITHERSBURG, Md. — Today, the U.S. Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute at the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced agreements that enable formal collaboration on AI safety research, testing and evaluation with both Anthropic and OpenAI.
Each company’s Memorandum of Understanding establishes the framework for the U.S. AI Safety Institute to receive access to major new models from each company prior to and following their public release. The agreements will enable collaborative research on how to evaluate capabilities and safety risks, as well as methods to mitigate those risks.
@kwiens: Hey @AnthropicAI: I get you're hungry for data. Claude is really smart! But do you really need to hit our servers a million times in 24 hours?
You're not only taking our content without paying, you're tying up our devops resources. Not cool.
menlovc.com: [Excerpt] The Anthology Fund is a $100 million initiative created through a partnership between Menlo Ventures and Anthropic to fuel the next generation of AI startups.
From our earliest meetings with Anthropic when we first invested in early 2023, we were impressed by their team’s caliber and commitment to world-changing, safe AI innovation. In a short time, Anthropic has launched best-in-class models powering a wide variety of market-leading applications and accelerated the imagination of countless entrepreneurs, which is why we doubled down by leading a significant follow-on round in 2024. With the Anthology Fund, we’ve teamed up to further our commitment to the most imaginative AI pioneers.
How much bigger and more powerful will the next AI models be?
@norgesbankinvestmentmanagement: Dario Amodei - CEO of Anthropic | Podcast | In Good Company | Norges Bank Investment Management
Dario Amodei CEO of Anthropic: Claude, New models, AI safety and Economic impact.
How much bigger and more powerful will the next AI models be? Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, joins Nicolai in Oslo to discuss the latest advancements in AI, the economic impact of this technology, and the importance of responsible scaling. Dario also shares his excitement about the upcoming models and his thoughts on who will profit the most from AI in the future. Don’t miss this enlightening conversation about the cutting-edge developments in AI. Tune in!
In Good Company is hosted by Nicolai Tangen, CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management. New episode out every Wednesday.
The podcast In Good Company is part of Norges Bank Investment Management, a podcast about our investments. We are transparent about how the fund is invested. In this podcast, you to get a deeper insight into the companies the fund is invested in.
Our CEO, Nicolai Tangen, has in-depth interviews with the leaders of some of the largest companies in the world. You will get insight into their leadership principles, the company’s strategy and how they are dealing with a large investor like us. You will also learn more about our role as an owner of the companies.
@genuineImpact: Top 20 start-up AI companies have raised a total of $38.3 billion.
Nearly one-third of that total comes from OpenAI, thanks to about $10 billion from Microsoft. Other rising AI firms like Anthropic ($7.7 billion) and Elon Musk's xAI ($6.1 billion) have also contributed significantly.
Interestingly, the well-known image generation AI, Midjourney, has never raised any funding.
Amazon Spokeperson:
Amazon insisted that a probe into this type of partnership with Anthropic is "unprecedented"
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☑️ #20 Mar 27, 2024
Amazon concludes $4 billion investment in Anthropic
aboutamazon.com: [Transcription] [Excerpt] Amazon and Anthropic deepen their shared commitment to advancing generative AI.
Deepening our commitment to advancing generative AI, today we have an update on the announcement we made to invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic for a minority ownership position in the company. Last September, we made an initial investment of $1.25 billion. Today, we made our additional $2.75 billion investment, bringing our total investment in Anthropic to $4 billion.
@DeItaone: ❖ FTX to Sell Two-Thirds of Anthropic Stake for $884 Million Bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX has struck $884 million in deals with two dozen buyers, including an Abu Dhabi investor, to sell most of its shares in Anthropic, an artificial-intelligence startup that counts Amazon and Google among its backers.
🔹Related content:
cnbc.com (3/22/24): The AI startup has ruled out taking any Saudi money over national security concerns, sources say, despite the kingdom’s ambitions to get in on the AI boom.
Deep-pocketed, sovereign wealth funds are among the investors clamoring to get a stake in Anthropic, the red-hot artificial intelligence startup that’s taking on OpenAI. One country that’s being left out: Saudi Arabia.
As bankers line up a group of potential new Anthropic backers, the company has ruled out taking money from the Saudis, according to people familiar with the matter. Anthropic executives cited national security, one of the sources told CNBC.
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☑️ #18 Feb 22, 2024
Crypto exchange FTX to sell shares in AI startup Anthropic
reuters.com: [Transcription] [Excerpt] NEW YORK, Feb 22 (Reuters) - Bankrupt crypto exchange FTX may sell its shares in artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, a U.S. judge ruled Thursday.
U.S. Bankruptcy Judge John Dorsey in Wilmington, Delaware approved FTX's proposal to sell the shares after FTX reached a compromise in court with a group of FTX customers that had opposed the sale.
Inside the Funding Frenzy at Anthropic, One of A.I.’s Hottest Start-Ups
nytimes.com: [Transcription] [Excerpts] The company raised $7.3 billion over the last year, as the lure of artificial intelligence changes Silicon Valley deal-making.
For all of A.I.’s promise of transforming every aspect of society, it has started by upending Silicon Valley’s start-up deal-making. Young companies typically raise money every 15 months or so, after showing that their businesses have grown. But since generative A.I. — which can generate text, images, sounds and video — burst onto the scene in late 2022, the rule book has been thrown out as investors have fought for a piece of the hottest developers.
Anthropic to Raise $750 Million in Menlo Ventures-Led Deal
theinformation.com: [Transcription] [Excerpts] Anthropic is in talks to raise $750 million in a venture round led by Menlo Ventures that values the two-year-old artificial intelligence startup at $15 billion not including the investment, more than three times its valuation this spring, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter. The round hasn't finalized. The final price could top $18 billion, according to a third person.
The investment adds to commitments secured from major cloud providers that also supply computing resources to the startup, one of the main rivals to OpenAI. The deal for the maker of the Claude chatbot shows VC investors’ continued strong appetite for the largest AI deals, as long as the startups are generating revenue..
A source with direct knowledge of the investment confirmed to Decrypt that the $750 million funding target is correct—but clarified that the Anthropic valuation of $18.4 billion is pre-round. The previously reported $20-30 billion target valuation was only a rumor, the source said, and declined to disclose who else might be joining in on the raise.
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☑️ #15 Nov 8, 2023
Google Announces Expansion of AI Partnership with Anthropic
googlecloudpresscorner.com: [Transcription] [Excerpts] Partnership includes important new collaborations on AI safety standards, committing to the highest standards of AI security, and use of TPU v5e accelerators for AI inference
Anthropic is now one of the first companies to deploy at scale TPU v5e—Google Cloud's most versatile, efficient, and scalable AI accelerator to date. Now generally available, TPU v5e enables Anthropic to serve its Claude large language model (LLM) in a performant and efficient manner.
Cloud TPU v5e is purpose-built to deliver the cost-efficiency and performance required for medium- and large-scale training and inference. Results of the MLPerf 3.1 Training benchmark, released today, found that TPU v5e delivers 2.3x higher training performance per dollar relative to the prior generation; this follows the MLPerf 3.1 Inferencing benchmark announced in September that found 2.7x serving performance per dollar compared to Cloud TPU v4. With Multislice large-scale training technology, Anthropic can scale its LLMs beyond the physical boundaries of a single TPU pod, up to tens of thousands of interconnected chips.
Google Commits $2 Billion in Funding to AI Startup Anthropic
wsj.com: [Transcription] [Excerpts] Google move follows Amazon investment as tech giants place bigger bets on startups racing to develop artificial intelligence.
Anthropic has also signed a multiyear deal with Google Cloud worth more than $3 billion, said one person familiar with the matter. The contract was signed a few months before the new investment, the person said.
Google Cloud (revised), owned by parent company, already invested $550 million in Anthropic earlier this year.
sacra.com: [Transcription] [Excerpt] OpenAI’s GPT-4 is the best LLM for reasoning and complex tasks, but it’s expensive and slow—opening the door for companies like Anthropic (Claude) and Cohere (Command) to target developers with cheaper and faster models. Cohere indexes on fitting more neatly into enterprise use cases—where building with GPT-4 requires enterprises to bring their corporate data into Azure OpenAI Studio, Cohere offers private cloud deployments, on-prem, and is compatible with all the major public clouds.
Music publishers sue AI company Anthropic over song lyrics
reuters.com: [Transcription] [Excerpts] Music publishers Universal Music (UMG.AS), ABKCO and Concord sued artificial intelligence company Anthropic in Tennessee federal court on Wednesday, accusing it of misusing an "innumerable" amount of copyrighted song lyrics to train its chatbot Claude
The publishers also say that Claude illegally reproduces the lyrics by request, and in response to "a whole range of prompts that do not seek Publishers' lyrics," including "requests to write a song about a certain topic, provide chord progressions for a given musical composition, or write poetry or short fiction in the style of a certain artist or songwriter."
Free experience and Claude Pro available in 95 countries
AnthropicAI: We’re rolling out access to http://Claude.ai to more people around the world. Starting today, users in 95 countries can talk to Claude and get help with their professional or day-to-day tasks. You can find the list of supported countries here:
@AnthropicAI: Since launching in July, millions of users have leveraged Claude’s expansive memory, 100K token context window and file upload feature. Claude has helped them analyze data, improve their writing and even talk to books and research papers.
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@AnthropicAI: Now users in all supported countries can access both our free experience and Claude Pro to boost their productivity and get more done.
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@AnthropicAI: We’re working hard to responsibly expand availability over the coming months—and will have more to share soon.
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☑️ #11 Oct 8, 2023
SBF wants to introduce evidence of the current value of his Anthropic investment
FTX invest in a bunch of companies. Most are crypto, but he also invested $500M in Anthropic, an AI startup.
Anthropic recently raised funds that would value FTX's equity at 3.5B - 4.5B.
SBF wants to introduce this new valuation, as proof that he didn't squander customer money. Some people, including customers who lost money, think there would be enough money in selling the Anthropic equity to make everyone whole. SBF may think that this would absolve him of any crime.
However, FTX is ~8B in the red. The Anthropic equity would not cover this. Also, it's not clear that FTX could get 4.5B if had to immediately sell all their Anthropic shares. Are there enough buyers at that price? Not sure.
More importantly for SBF, the ends does not justify the means in the eye of the law. He misrepresented the riskiness of FTX by lying about FTX's relationship with Alameda. In particular, he told everyone that Alameda was treated the same as all other customers and could be liquidated when its funds got too low. In practice, SBF directed employees to allow Alameda go negative, putting customers at risk of FTX becoming unsolvent, which ended up happening.
Case 1:22-cr-00673-LAK
Document 315 Filed 10/08/23 Page 1 of 3
U.S. Department of Justice
United States Attorney Southern District of New York
October 8, 2023
[Excerpt #1] … By way of background, the defendant invested approximately $500 million in Anthropic, a startup artificial intelligence company, in April 2022. The Government expects to introduce evidence that the defendant funded this investment with FTX customer deposits.
In the past few weeks, Anthropic has announced that it is attempting to raise additional funds from investors, including Amazon and Google, at a valuation between $20 billion and $30 billion. In the wake of this announcement, there has been some public reporting suggesting that this valuation would increase the value of the defendant’s investment in Anthropic and thereby increase the potential recovery for FTX customers and other creditors in the FTX bankruptcy.
[Excerpt #2] … Although Anthropic’s valuation in its latest fundraising round has increased relative to its prior fundraising rounds, these fundraising rounds represent venture capital investments where the valuation is based on projections of future revenue growth that are highly speculative. To take one salient example, FTX itself raised similar venture investments at valuations of around $18 billion in 2021 and around $32 billion in 2022 and yet today its shares are worth nothing.
Permitting the defendant to introduce evidence of Anthropic’s valuation in its venture fundraising rounds would necessitate a mini trial regarding the value of assets available through the bankruptcy and the degree to which they might cover customer and other creditor losses. Given that such inquiry bears no relevance to the issues that the jury will need to decide, the Court should preclude this evidence.
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☑️ #10 Oct 4, 2023 🔴 rumor
Google eyed for $2 billion Anthropic deal after major Amazon play
readwrite.com: [Transcription] [Excerpts] The massive cash infusion comes as Anthropic ramps up efforts to develop more powerful AI models beyond Claude. According to leaked documents, the company aims to build Claude Next, an AI system ten times more capable than existing models that would require computing power exceeding today’s most advanced supercomputers.
To achieve this goal, Anthropic has been locking in partnerships with tech giants like Amazon Web Services, which agreed last week to provide cloud infrastructure and services valued up to $4 billion. The deal makes Amazon the “primary cloud provider for mission-critical workloads” for Anthropic as it scales up Claude Next and other models.
anthropic.com: [Transcription] [Excerpts] Today, we’re announcing that Amazon will invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic. The agreement is part of a broader collaboration to develop the most reliable and high-performing foundation models in the industry. Our frontier safety research and products, together with Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) expertise in running secure, reliable infrastructure, will make Anthropic’s safe and steerable AI widely accessible to AWS customers.
AWS will become Anthropic’s primary cloud provider for mission critical workloads, providing our team with access to leading compute infrastructure in the form of AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips, which will be used in addition to existing solutions for model training and deployment. Together, we’ll combine our respective expertise to collaborate on the development of future Trainium and Inferentia technology.
Our Investment in Anthropic: The Foundation Layer for Generative AI: [Transcription] [Excerpt] Building on a Portfolio of AI Infrastructure and Application Layer Leaders. For Menlo Ventures, our partnership with Anthropic is the latest in years of investing in AI at the infrastructure and application layers.
Polaris Ventures: Organization and goals Polaris Ventures is an Association domiciled in Switzerland and organized under Swiss law. Polaris Ventures is registered under number CHE-455.562.321 with the Commercial Register of the Canton of Basel-Stadt (Handelsregisteramt des Kantons Basel-Stadt). Polaris Ventures’ purpose, according to its statutes, is as follows: continue reading
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☑️ #1 May 28, 2021
Anthropic raises $124 million to build more reliable, general AI systems
anthropic.com: Anthropic, an AI safety and research company, has raised $124 million in a Series A. The financing round will support Anthropic in executing against its research roadmap and building prototypes of reliable and steerable AI systems.
“Anthropic’s goal is to make the fundamental research advances that will let us build more capable, general, and reliable AI systems, then deploy these systems in a way that benefits people. We’re thrilled to be working with investors that support us in this mission and expect to concentrate on research in the immediate term,” said Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.
Anthropic will focus on research into increasing the safety of AI systems; specifically, the company is focusing on increasing the reliability of large-scale AI models, developing the techniques and tools to make them more interpretable, and building ways to more tightly integrate human feedback into the development and deployment of these systems.
The Series A round was led by Jaan Tallinn, technology investor and co-founder of Skype. The round included participation from James McClave, Dustin Moskovitz, the Center for Emerging Risk Research, Eric Schmidt, and others.
To find out more about Anthropic’s research agenda and approach, you can read our website and its job postings. The company is hiring researchers, engineers, and operational experts to support it in executing against its research roadmap. Find out more here: Anthropic.com.
Anthropic has uncovered a new approach to AI safety that shapes the outputs of AI systems according to a set of principles. The approach is called Constitutional AI (CAI) because it gives an AI system a set of principles (i.e., a “constitution”) against which it can evaluate its own outputs. CAI enables AI systems to generate useful responses while also minimizing harm. This is important because existing techniques for training models to mirror human preferences face trade-offs between harmlessness and helpfulness. Other benefits of CAI include its scalability and increased model transparency. https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.08073
About: Anthropic is an AI safety and research company. We build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.
*Anthropic currently is a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) - What is a PBC?
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