According to The Information, the new round is on the cards despite the recent $4B commitment by Amazon.

Anthropic, a significant player in the generative artificial intelligence sector, continues its quest for substantial investments, despite already securing substantial funding. The company is currently in discussions with potential investors, including tech giant Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL), in pursuit of a new $2 billion funding round. This follows Amazon’s (NASDAQ: AMZN) recent commitment to invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic.

What’s striking is Anthropic’s ambitious valuation goal. The company aims to achieve a valuation ranging from $20 billion to $30 billion after this funding round, a significant jump from its previous valuation of $4 billion in March. This would position Anthropic’s shares as pricier relative to revenue compared to its competitor, OpenAI. (Silicon Angle)

Despite its relative youth, Anthropic is making waves with its generative AI models, designed to rival OpenAI. One of its flagship models, Claude 2, resembles ChatGPT, capable of generating marketing copy, solving mathematical problems, and engaging in human-like conversations. However, Anthropic’s aspirations go further, with plans to create an even more resource-intensive model called Claude Next, surpassing the capabilities of even the most advanced supercomputers. Achieving this goal requires substantial capital.

To address the hefty costs of running such AI models, Anthropic recently launched Claude Pro, a paid subscription service that allows users to send more messages and receive priority access during peak usage times.

The substantial costs associated with AI development are evident in OpenAI’s reported monthly expenditure of $21 million on cloud-based resources for ChatGPT. Anthropic aims to raise up to $5 billion over the next two years, with the goal of creating a generative AI system ten times more powerful than any existing model. Such an achievement demands computing infrastructure capable of delivering a staggering 10 septillion floating-point operations per second (FLOPs), far exceeding the capacity of today’s most powerful supercomputers.

Anthropic’s strategic collaboration with Amazon provides not only financial support but also access to Amazon’s robust cloud infrastructure, including high-performance computing instances and AI-specific chips. Amazon Web Services is designated as the startup’s primary cloud provider for essential workloads.

This collaboration highlights the mutually symbiotic relationship between AI startups and cloud infrastructure providers.

But Google’s potential interest in Anthropic indicates the attractiveness of substantial funding in the AI sector in 2023.

Related Story:  Amazon To Invest Up To $4B In AI Startup Anthropic