Anthropic, an artificial intelligence startup led by former OpenAI executives, has secured a $2 billion investment commitment from Google, according to sources familiar with the deal. The agreement includes a $500 million cash injection and another $1.5 billion to be invested over time.

Amazon to invest $4 billion in AI startup Anthropic and partner on generative AI

Anthropic is the creator of Claude 2, a chatbot that competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and is used by popular platforms such as Slack, Notion and Quora. The company was founded in 2021 and has raised funds from other tech giants such as Salesforce and Zoom. It was valued at $4.1 billion earlier this year.

Claude 2 can generate summaries of up to 75,000 words, which is equivalent to a book-length text. Users can feed large data sets into the chatbot and request summaries in various formats, such as memos, letters or stories. ChatGPT, on the other hand, can handle only about 3,000 words.

A study by Arthur AI, a machine learning monitoring platform, found that Claude 2 was the most reliable chatbot in terms of self-awareness, which means it can accurately assess its own knowledge and answer only questions that it has data to support. Arthur AI compared chatbots from Meta , Cohere and OpenAI.

Google became a shareholder of Anthropic in April, when it invested $300 million for a 10% stake. In the same month, Anthropic was invited to a meeting at the White House with Vice President Kamala Harris to discuss responsible AI development. Other attendees included Alphabet, Microsoft and OpenAI.

Anthropic raised another $450 million in May, in what was then the largest funding round for an AI company since Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI in January, according to PitchBook data.

Anthropic was co-founded by siblings Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei, who were both vice presidents at OpenAI. Several other former OpenAI researchers also joined Anthropic’s founding team.

Daniela Amodei told CNBC in July that Anthropic spent at least two months developing its latest chatbot, with a team of 30 to 35 people working on the AI model and 150 people supporting it. She said the market demand for large language models was so high that there was enough room for multiple players to thrive.

“It’s a really unusual time from a business perspective because there’s just so much demand for large language models and really more demand than the industry can currently provide,” Amodei said at the time. “The landscape is just very wide, and there’s really quite a lot of room for many different users and types of users to make use of these systems.”

Potential implications:

• The investment is a sign of the growing competition in the field of large language models.
• Large language models could have a major impact on a wide range of industries, including technology, media, and entertainment.
• Google’s investment in Anthropic could help to accelerate the development of large language models and make them more widely available.
• It is important to develop responsible AI guidelines and regulations to ensure that large language models are used for good.