The CEO of $18 billion Anthropic admits most startups won’t find a way to afford to enter the AI race.
In a recent podcast, “In Good Company,” interview Joined by Norges Bank CEO Nicolai Tangen, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei delved into the details of AI development – including how much effort it takes to get an AI model off the ground.
Amodi said it costs about $100 million to coach an AI model, but “there are models out there now that cost more like a billion.”
Amodei estimates that current prices will soon be considered lower in comparison with the costs of developing competing AI in the next few years.
“I think if we get to $10 billion or $100 billion, and I think that will happen in 2025, 2026, maybe 2027… then I think there’s a good chance that by then we’ll be able to have models that are better than most people at most things,” Amodei said.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. Photo: Chesnot/Getty Images
The high costs of building AI set the bar high for startups seeking to build their very own models to compete with OpenAI or Anthropic.
On average, American startups raised roughly $59 million in the fourth stage of Series C financing in the first quarter of 2023 – which is far from 450 million dollars Anthropic raised Series C funding in May 2023.
Anthropic raised above 8 billion dollars Meet with someone.
Amodei admitted that many corporations is not going to find a way to participate in the AI race.
“Of course, I think there will be a thriving downstream ecosystem and an ecosystem for small models,” he said.
Anthropic’s release of Claude 3 Opus in March, the latest version of its flagship AI chatbot Claude, sparked discussion about “metacognition,” or the potential for AI to observe its activity and self-correct. An Anthropic engineer revealed at the time that Opus appeared to know when engineers were running a test on it.
Amodei also stated in the interview that Anthropic is working on AI chips to compete with Nvidia from Google and Amazon, two corporations that have invested as much as $2 billion AND 4 billion dollars respectively in Anthropic.
The costs of AI may also mean environmental damage. A Google report last week revealed that emissions have increased by almost 50% in 4 years attributable to AI.