Google DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic just agreed to grant the UK government early access to their AI models for safety evaluations. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced the deal alongside a £100M taskforce and an upcoming global summit, aiming to position the UK as the world capital of AI guardrails.
Salesforce Ventures just doubled its Generative AI Fund from $250 million to $500 million to back enterprise AI startups. The fund also brought Humane and Tribble into its portfolio alongside earlier bets on Anthropic, Cohere, and You.com. Salesforce is clearly determined to lock down the future of corporate AI software early.
Anthropic just secured $450 million in Series C funding led by Spark Capital, backed by tech heavyweights Google, Salesforce, and Zoom. The raise boosts its total funding to $1.45 billion to fuel next-gen self-teaching algorithms and its constitutional AI safety tech. Why it matters: Big Tech is actively arming Anthropic as the premier counterweight to OpenAI.
Zoom just partnered with and invested in Anthropic to bake its Claude chatbot across its productivity suite. The AI will first land in Zoom Contact Center to improve customer self-service and pull up helpful materials for human agents, adding to Zoom's existing OpenAI tie-up. Why it matters: Zoom is adopting a multi-model strategy to keep up with Slack and Microsoft.
Anthropic just expanded Claude’s context window from 9K to 100K tokens, or about 75,000 words. The model can now digest hundreds of pages of documentation, books, or financial reports and synthesize answers in seconds. The 100K context window is available now via Anthropic's API.
Stability AI just released StableVicuna-13B, billed as the first large-scale open-source chatbot fine-tuned using reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). Built on Vicuna-13B and trained using trlX alongside open preference datasets from Anthropic and OpenAssistant, it brings the post-training playbook behind ChatGPT into open source. Weights are available on Hugging Face as a delta over original LLaMA weights.
Amazon just launched Bedrock, a serverless cloud platform letting builders access top-tier AI models from Anthropic, Stability AI, and its own Titan family via API. Developers can privately fine-tune models with as few as 20 labeled examples without managing clusters. Why it matters: AWS is turning into an enterprise AI bazaar, embedding generative tech straight into its existing cloud stack.
Anthropic is looking to raise up to $5 billion over the next two years to challenge OpenAI, according to leaked pitch deck documents. The startup plans to spend $1 billion over the next 18 months to train a frontier model tentatively called "Claude-Next," promising 10 times the capability of current leading systems.
Anthropic just made its next-gen AI assistant Claude available across chat and API. Designed to be helpful, honest, and harmless, it arrives in two versions: the flagship Claude and a faster, cheaper Claude Instant. Early partners like Notion and Quora highlight its steerability and natural conversational style.
DuckDuckGo just launched DuckAssist, a new feature that uses AI to summarize Wikipedia entries right at the top of search results. Powered by models from OpenAI and Anthropic, it answers factual queries without requiring a login or collecting personal data. The tool is currently available in beta through DuckDuckGo's apps and browser extensions.
Anthropic just began opening access to its text-generating AI models to select partners, kicking off commercialization with legal tech startup Robin AI. Robin is fine-tuning the model to help lawyers draft and negotiate contracts. The move signals that the safety-focused research lab is ready to monetize and take on OpenAI directly.
Google just invested roughly $300 million into AI startup Anthropic for a 10% stake, backing the team of former OpenAI researchers behind Claude. Anthropic also named Google Cloud as its preferred cloud partner. Why it matters: Google is racing to build its own heavyweight counterweight against Microsoft's massive bet on OpenAI.
CB Insights just mapped out the generative AI landscape, revealing that startups raised over $2.6B across 110 deals in 2022. Despite massive hype around ChatGPT, more than 80% of identified companies are still at Series A or earlier, showing the market is just getting started.
