Alphabet invests $300 million in AI start-up Anthropic

Alphabet invested $300 million in AI start-up Anthropic at the end of last year. That company makes a competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Anthropic says it plans to work on Google Cloud in the future and co-develop AI systems with Google.

The investment would have been made at the end of last year but was not named at the time, writes The Financial Times. Google parent company Alphabet is said to have invested about $ 300 million, or 277 million euros, in Anthropic, against which the start-up has a ten percent share. Alphabet confirms the investment to the newspaper, but does not provide any further details.

Meanwhile, Anthropic has itself announced that it wants to partner with Google Cloud to run its artificial intelligence systems. Anthropic says that “the companies can co-develop AI computing systems” by using Google’s TPU and GPU clusters to train and scale the AI ​​systems. Neither Anthropic nor Alphabet links the previous investment and the use of Cloud to each other. Anthropic is working on a chatbot called Claude, which includes a search engine.

Alphabet’s investment is very similar to that of competitor Microsoft in OpenAI. Microsoft previously invested ten billion dollars in this. At the same time, the investment is also different, because Alphabet itself is also working on an artificial intelligence that is comparable to ChatGPT. Feeling the heat of the competition, the company recently enlisted founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin to help with the company’s AI strategy. Google is hosting an event on Wednesday where it may showcase a first version of its chatbot in Search.