Inside Google-Backed Anthropic's $5 Billion, 4-Year Plan To Take on OpenAI

AI research startup Anthropic aims to raise as much as $5 billion over the next two years to take on rival OpenAI and enter over a dozen major industries, according to company documents obtained by TechCrunch. From the report: A pitch deck for Anthropic's Series C fundraising round discloses these and other long-term goals for the company, which was founded in 2020 by former OpenAI researchers. In the deck, Anthropic says that it plans to build a 'frontier model' -- tentatively called 'Claude-Next' -- 10 times more capable than today's most powerful AI, but that this will require a billion dollars in spending over the next 18 months.

Anthropic describes the frontier model as a 'next-gen algorithm for AI self-teaching,' making reference to an AI training technique it developed called 'constitutional AI.' At a high level, constitutional AI seeks to provide a way to align AI with human intentions -- letting systems respond to questions and perform tasks using a simple set of guiding principles. Anthropic estimates its frontier model will require on the order of 10^25 FLOPs, or floating point operations -- several orders of magnitude larger than even the biggest models today. Of course, how this translates to computation time depends on the speed and scale of the system doing the computation; Anthropic implies (in the deck) it relies on clusters with 'tens of thousands of GPUs.'

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