The race for AI dominance between Google and Microsoft is continuing with almost daily AI news updates on this site. Recently, Microsoft formed a partnership with OpenAI, creators of the popular chatbot, ChatGPT, and Google now potentially turning to a company founded by former OpenAI employees, Anthropic. The Financial Times are reporting that Google invested approximately $300 million in Anthropic in late 2022, giving them a 10% stake in the company, with the agreement that Anthropic would purchase cloud computing resources from Google. This arrangement is like the one between Microsoft and OpenAI, where OpenAI provides research expertise while Microsoft supplies funding and access to their cloud platform for training AI models.

Anthropic, founded in 2021 by former OpenAI vice president of research, Dario Amodei, and several other researchers, is also developing their own general-purpose chatbot, Claude, which could potentially rival ChatGPT. However, it’s unclear whether Google plans to integrate Claude into their services as Microsoft is doing with ChatGPT, as Google already has extensive in-house experience in AI language systems. The Financial Times suggests that the motivation behind the deal could be to boost Google’s cloud computing business.

The creation of Anthropic was prompted by a disagreement over OpenAI’s direction, as the company shifted towards a more commercial focus following their first deal with Microsoft in 2019. Many AI researchers have criticized this shift as increasingly reckless, particularly with the launch of ChatGPT onto the public web without proper safeguards. In contrast, Anthropic prioritizes the development of “reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.” It remains to be seen if Google’s investment will impact these priorities.

The tech giant, Google, is set to reveal more about their AI plans at an upcoming event on February 8th, while Microsoft is expected to share their plans to integrate ChatGPT into Bing soon.