Google is already competing with OpenAI’s ChatGPT with its own Bard model, but it also seems to be attacking OpenAI’s lead through an investment.
Anthropic AI plans to spend $5 billion over the next few years to build a model that’s 10x as powerful as today’s models, Techcrunch reports. As per its pitch 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.
“These models could begin to automate large portions of the economy,” the pitch deck reads. “We believe that companies that train the best 2025/26 models will be too far ahead for anyone to catch up in subsequent cycles.”
Interestingly, Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former senior members of OpenAI, siblings Daniela Amodei and Dario Amodei, the latter whom served as OpenAI’s Vice President of Research. The Amodei siblings were among others who left OpenAI due to directional differences, specifically regarding OpenAI’s ventures with Microsoft in 2019.
Earlier this year, Google had invested $300 million in Anthropic. The investment had come right after OpenAI’s ChatGPT had exploded in popular consciousness. Not long after, Google had released its own LLM in Bard, which while competent, is widely thought to be less sophisticated than GPT-4.
But the investment in Anthropic AI gives Google another front with which it’ll deal with the threat from OpenAI. Google is one of the pioneers of Artificial Intelligence, having first published the Transformers paper which forms the basis of most modern LLMs, but OpenAI has managed to steal a march over it in recent months. But with its own LLM in Bard, and an investment in an ambitious startup founded by former OpenAI researchers, it can be well positioned to be at the cutting edge of AI in the coming years.