😺 Anthropic wants how much $$!?

PLUS: Google plays defense, again

Author

Pete Huang
April 07, 2023

Welcome, humans.

Congrats to all the YC startups finishing up this week. The next batch is already right around the corner (applications close tonight at 7pm PT) - let's see how much AI we see this time 🤓

Here’s what’s going on in the world of AI today:

  • ⚾ Anthropic swings for the fences

  • 🥴 Google tries to buy more time

  • 📚 100 free AI courses

  • 📒 AI accountant's assistant

Anthropic Charts Its Course 🗺️

OpenAI may seem like they're running away with it. But we're just months into a revolution that will take years.

"2nd place" AI model startup Anthropic is pitching investors on an ambition plan to overtake OpenAI over the next few years. Here's what it entails:

  • Anthropic wants to build Claude-Next, an AI model 10x better than what exists today

  • That'll take $1 billion over 18 months, and the entire company may need up to $5 billion in the next 2-3 years

It's a LOT of money, but investors have good reasons to bite:

  • Investors want competition; an overly dominant OpenAI could take big cuts from every software startup, causing everyone to be less profitable

  • While OpenAI is busy making ChatGPT (a consumer app) as good as possible, Anthropic could outflank them on enterprise

Time is of the essence. Anthropic says the race could be over in 2025/2026 - the lead pack then could decide the future.

Google: Search Chat is Coming, We Swear 🔍

It's been two months since Google first announced Bard, its ChatGPT competitor.

In that time, Microsoft Bing announced and released its Chat feature (powered by GPT-4) to the wider public, while Google Bard remains limited to beta users.

Still, Google CEO Sundar Pichai says they're definitely planning to integrate Bard into search. It'll just take some unspecified amount of time to do it.

There are good reasons why Google should be tread carefully:

  • Google is hyper-dominant in search - it can't afford reckless mistakes like Microsoft can

  • This is a long game. After all, we're only talking a few months.

But it's hard to come off as the winner when the CEO of Bing is tweeting every few days with product updates and you're giving non-answers in interviews.

Zoom out: We still can't tell if we're being impatient or if this is Google actually failing to keep up with the times.

Around the Horn 🦄

  • LinkedIn is offering 100 AI courses for free through June.

  • Open source AI nonprofit LAION wants your help training a completely open and free ChatGPT.

  • Microsoft Edge rolls out an embedded image generator.

  • While Europe (Italy, France, Germany, Ireland) consider ramping up ChatGPT bans, India leans the other way.

Treats To Try 🍿

  • Intern by Basis: ChatGPT for accounting and tax. No, it doesn't do your taxes for you 😕

  • Apollo: a ChatGPT-powered app for realtime knowledge.

  • Graphmaker: Use chat to create graphs out of your data.

  • Toolkit: Use natural language to create your own AI plugins (e.g., ChatGPT Plugins)

  • More developers are getting access to build ChatGPT Plugins. Two early projects: text-to-video and text-to-image within ChatGPT.

  • People figured out how to run an open-source version of ChatGPT on a graphic calculator.

DM us links on Twitter: @nonmayorpete & @noahedelman02.

Friday Fun Fact 👻

Hot AI startups like Cohere, Character, Adept and Anthropic have collectively raised about $2 billion in funding (not including the billions more that Anthropic is seeking - mentioned above).

All 4 companies had founding members who co-authored the landmark 2017 research paper that kicked off this current wave of AI.

That's all we have for today!

A Cat's Commentary 😻

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