Cloud giants "take sides" with AI unicorn, Google invests $2 billion in leading competitor Anthropic.

Although the dismal performance of Google's cloud business in the third quarter caused the stock price to plummet by 10% in a week, the competition around AI is still ongoing. This old-fashioned giant, once known for its AI research and development capabilities, is now working hard to catch up with its competitors in the competition with OpenAI and Microsoft.

On October 28th, according to media reports, Google has agreed to invest an additional $2 billion in Anthropic, the developer of AI chatbot Claude and a star AI startup, to support the competition between the company and OpenAI in large-scale models.

Microsoft "supports" OpenAI, Amazon and Google "side with" Anthropic. The close investment and cooperation between the three major cloud computing giants and startups also highlights the fierce competition in the US market for large-scale AI models.

Investing an additional $2 billion, Google strongly supports AI startups

According to sources, under the terms of the transaction, Google will make an initial investment of $500 million, followed by an additional $1.5 billion. Insiders also said that a few months before this investment, Anthropic had signed a multi-year contract worth $3 billion with Google Cloud.

Anthropic is currently one of the hottest star startups besides OpenAI. It was founded by former OpenAI scientists Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei. Two years ago, they had a dispute with OpenAI CEO Altman over how to safely develop artificial intelligence. They then left OpenAI and launched the AI chatbot Claude this year, directly targeting ChatGPT.

Previously, Anthropic's funding mainly came from the collapsed cryptocurrency platform FTX. After FTX went bankrupt, under the huge cost pressure of large-scale model development, Anthropic chose to continue seeking financing.

As early as the beginning of this year, Google had already invested $550 million in Anthropic. Subsequently, in September, Anthropic received a $4 billion investment from Amazon. In addition to Google's announced $2 billion investment, this means that Anthropic has raised approximately $7 billion in less than a year.

However, compared to Microsoft's additional investment of billions of dollars in OpenAI in January, this number is still slightly inferior.

Google is catching up, investing and developing AI simultaneously

Google has made a big bet on artificial intelligence. It not only hopes to catch up with Amazon and Microsoft in the lucrative cloud computing market but also hopes that AI software can encourage enterprise customers to increase their spending.

In addition to Anthropic, Google has also made significant investments in AI video production tool developer Runway and open-source AI software provider Hugging Face. In addition, according to media reports, Sissie Hsiao, the Vice President of Product who leads Google's AI assistant Bard team, is instilling a "wolf culture" in her subordinates, overturning Google's overly cautious and slow approach.

For example, employees are required to work overtime on weekends and evenings to meet project deadlines. Some employees describe Bard as being in a "wartime" state, with "Bard speed" being much faster than other departments at Google. Legal reviews of new features can now be started and completed within a day, compared to the previous requirement of a quarter's preparation.