Despite Tough Financial Conditions, Google Invests $300M in ChatGPT’s Rival Anthropic

Soon after the release of  ChatGPT, Google’s existence, and role in the near future have been questioned. Reports have suggested that Google has been overly investing in AI projects since ChatGPT became the talk of the town. Lending credence to that claim is a new report by Bloomberg, which suggests that Google has made a substantial investment in a firm that is working on a ChaGPT rival named Anthropic.

According to the report, Google has invested close to $400 million in Anthropic. Anthropic is an AI safety and research company, which is reportedly working on a chatbot, which is very much like ChatGPT.

Google hasn’t come forward yet with any official statement about the deal but Anthropic did post on its official blog about the partnership with Google. In the blog post, Anthropic said: 

“The partnership is designed so that the companies can co-develop AI computing systems; Anthropic will leverage Google Cloud’s cutting-edge GPU and TPU clusters to train, scale, and deploy its AI systems.”

 Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in the statement regarding the deal with Google and said:

“We’re partnering with Google Cloud to support the next phase of Anthropic, where we’re going to deploy our AI systems to a larger set of people. This partnership gives us the cloud infrastructure performance and scale we need.”

Anthropic is working on developing and deploying Claude, an AI assistant based on the company’s research into building safe, steerable AI, as per the company. The company claims that it has created safety techniques like Constitutional AI to create AI technologies that are easier to rely on and understand.

“We are eager to use the Google Cloud infrastructure to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. This partnership with Google Cloud will let us build a more robust AI platform,” 

Many huge tech companies including, Alphabet and Amazon have already been investing billions of dollars into the field of AI-related research. Alphabet recently revealed that they were laying off 12,000 employees globally and shifting the company’s focus towards AI. 

Google’s management has shown concerns that the chatbot could replace search engines. With digital ads bringing in more than 80% of Alphabet’s revenue last year, it’s not likely that they’ll want to replace the search engine with a chatbot anytime soon.

In January, Microsoft invested $10 billion in ChatGPT maker OpenAI, which is now rumored to eventually power Microsoft’s search engine Bing a distant second place to Google’s search engine. ChatGPT’s release and subsequent popularity were enough for Google executives to get panicked. 

Google is also hosting an event related to Search and Maps, which has the internet speculating about some kind of ChatGPT-related announcement. The details of the announcement are unknown, but the event’s description says, 

“We’re reimagining how people search for, explore and interact with information, making it more natural and intuitive than ever before to find what you need.”

According to a recent report in the New York Times, Microsoft is relying on its strong financial position and the power of the AI tools created by openAI to be at the forefront of generative artificial intelligence. This refers to technology that can generate text, images, social media posts, and other media from short text reports.

Recently, it was revealed that ChatGPT passed an MBA exam given by a Wharton professor. Teachers have been reporting that students are using the AI-powered tool to write essays. Many companies have started using the tool to create content as the list of uses teeters between fun and functional.

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