Artificial intelligence?! Anthropic starts supplying selected firms with its text-generating AI algorithms.
Artificial Intelligence
Ex-OpenAI workers who co-founded the popular AI business Anthropic have started providing partners with access to its AI text-generating algorithms.
Robin AI, a legal tech business that has attracted over $13 million from investors such as Plural, Episode 1, and the Google Black Founders Fund, is the first commercial venture to reveal that it is incorporating anthropological models. Poe, a Quora experimental chatbot software for iOS and Android that employs anthropomorphic models, is not yet generating any revenue.
Richard Robinson, CEO of Robin, provided TechCrunch with limited information on the company’s partnership with Anthropic, but he did say that Robin worked to improve an Anthropic model on a database of legal material in order to design and negotiate contracts.
“We are very fortunate to be Anthropic’s launch partner for the legal sector — the team’s focus on AI safety aligns with our ‘lawyer-in-the-loop’ software-as-a-service product — deliberately designed to manage the risk of even the most advanced models ‘hallucinating,’” Robinson said in a statement.
Anthropic has kept a low profile on its intentions to commercialise its work in the field of generative text AI, choosing instead to concentrate on scholarly investigation. Claude, a closed beta AI system that the business released late last year, was comparable to OpenAI’s ChatGPT but looked to be significantly improved over the first. Anthropic’s “constitutional AI” method, which was used to create Claude, aims to provide a “principle-based” approach to aligning AI systems with human intentions by letting ChatGPT-like AI respond to queries by using a straightforward set of principles (e.g., avoid giving harmful advice) as a guide.
First assessments of Claude were favourable. Similar to ChatGPT, the system had drawbacks such providing risky responses to inquiries (like how to create meth at home) and delivering inconsistent, factually incorrect replies.
Neither Robin nor Anthropic will confirm if the model Robin is employing is Claude or a derivation. Anthropic refused to say how many partners it now works with (or how they came to work with them) or how many models it intends to make available for commercial use, even after being pressed repeatedly.
Yet, it’s undeniable that Anthropic is under some pressure from investors to make back the hundreds of millions of dollars that were invested in its AI technology.
The firm received a 10% ownership in exchange for $300 million in Anthropic offered most recently by Google. Anthropic agreed to designate Google Cloud as its “preferred cloud provider” in accordance with the conditions of the agreement, which was originally reported by the Financial Times. The firms also committed to “co-develop[ing] AI computing solutions.”
Anthropic wasn’t established with a solely commercial goal in mind. Former OpenAI vice president of research Dario Amodei founded the organisation in 2021 as a public benefit corporation, bringing with him a number of OpenAI staff members, notably former public policy director Jack Clark. Amodei left OpenAI following a dispute on the future of the business, namely the startup’s escalating commercial focus.
Yet creating and keeping up with AI systems is expensive. A $580 million tranche from a group of investors that included disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, Caroline Ellison, Jim McClave, Nishad Singh, Jaan Tallinn, and the Center for Emerging Risk Research was obtained by Anthropic as a result of ballooning expenditures.
It’s not yet apparent whether startup collaborations and Big Tech funding signify a change in Anthropic’s ambitions. What is evident, though, is that the business thinks its innovation sets it apart from rivals like OpenAI, Cohere, and AI21 Labs, all of which charge for access to their text-generating AI via APIs.
