On the heels of OpenAI announcing the latest version of its GPT large-scale language model, America's biggest rival in generative AI has announced an extension of its own. Anthropic announced Monday that its AI assistant, Claude, is now live in Europe, with support for “multiple languages” including French, German, Italian, and Spanish across Claude.ai, iOS apps, and business plans for teams. It was announced that there was.
This release comes after Anthropic extended its API to Europe to allow developers to use and integrate its models. Both are part of the startup's larger push toward faster growth. Anthropic has raised nearly $8 billion to date at a valuation of $18.4 billion (post-money), more than $7 billion of which came in the last year.
Co-founder and president Daniela Amodei confirmed to TechCrunch that Anthropic is in the process of raising additional primary capital. “Yes, but I can't comment further,” she said of her fundraiser in an email interview.
Anthropic's current list of approximately 60 investors includes strategic investors Amazon, Google, Salesforce, SAP, and Zoom. Alameda and FTX recently announced plans to sell their former shares at an incremental value of $884 million as part of a secondary transaction related to their bankruptcy proceedings.
Anthropic isn't the only company capitalizing on investors' strong appetite to back AI startups. Sources close to Mistral AI, another LLM player, say the company is talking to investors to raise nearly $600 million at a $6 billion valuation. SoftBank does not specifically invest in any of these companies, and has included SoftBank as one of the candidates for support.
While investors are currently very enthusiastic about generative AI, consumers may not be as enthusiastic. As we reported last week, Anthropic's iOS app, released in early May, has so far received a lackluster response from users, and how much of the interest in AI we're currently seeing is just a passing fad. The big question is whether this is just a fad. That could pose a challenge as the company looks for more business across the pond.
Amodei notes that Anthropic is primarily focused on work and enterprise applications, with an emphasis on a more “fluid” experience that moves from personal accounts to work accounts and switches between different interfaces and platforms. Therefore, we believe that there is no simple comparison between our iOS release and OpenAI's release. And what she's hinting at may have been a stroke of luck for her bigger rivals.
“ChatGPT on mobile came out when these kinds of consumer applications were still in a very early stage, and a lot has changed since then,” she said. He said that “millions” of consumers in the US and UK use Claude, and that since the launch of the company's latest model, the Claude 3, “adoption of paid subscriptions for Claude (Claude Pro) continues to grow. It's progressing very strongly,” he added. At the beginning of this year.
“Our primary focus is on work and enterprise applications, and the recent launch of the Claude Team Plan demonstrates our continued trend. We want our employees to engage with Claude in the ways that feel most intuitive, including using Slack on their laptops during work hours and on their phones during work hours. Just like when they're on the go, Claude is building toward a fairly fluid experience that allows users to switch between personal and work accounts, or switch between laptop and mobile. ”
Daniela Amodei did not provide specific numbers on API penetration in Europe, but said that “we continue to see rapid growth in key European markets such as France and Germany.” Raising user interest across Europe is just one example of her. Describe the company's challenges in this market.
Europe has been one of the most vocal countries on the subject of AI safety and regulation, particularly with regard to the AI Act passed earlier this year. Amodei believes Anthropic is well prepared to operate within the European framework.
“Anthropic was founded on the premise of building the most secure AI systems in the industry and leading the forefront of AI safety research,” she said, adding that the company is committed to complying with regulations such as the EU’s GDPR. It added that it was working “diligently” to become compliant. She added that it is still unclear how the AI law will be enforced.
“Although the AI Act has been approved, there are still many steps left to develop detailed implementation guidance over the coming months, and we intend to work with the EU in this process,” he said. He added that he will continue to work on and contribute to industry efforts to improve the safety of AI. This includes banning the use of AI technology for political campaigns and lobbying, and includes automated systems to detect related violations and misinformation.
Research on machine interpretability, which she describes as “research that seeks to open the 'black box' of AI models to reveal their inner workings,” will help us understand what's going on inside AI in 2023. We have made ground-breaking progress centered on “dictionary learning” for the purpose of learning. She said she creates models as she “thinks.” “Ultimately, we hope to use this new understanding to develop ways to guide models toward safer behavior.”
Amodei said Anthropic currently has 40 employees based in its London office, along with several contractors based in European countries, and in particular as it builds a new office in Dublin. Preparations are also underway for hiring.