Anthropic Series A Funding for Reliable General AI Systems

Anthropic has raised $124 million in Series A funding to accelerate the development of reliable, steerable, and general AI systems. This investment allows the company to execute its research roadmap and build prototypes of AI systems designed for safety and reliability.

Core Research Objectives

Anthropic focuses on creating large-scale AI systems that are steerable, interpretable, and robust. The company's research agenda is centered on increasing AI safety through three primary technical pillars:

• Reliability: Increasing the reliability of large-scale AI models to ensure consistent and safe performance.
• Interpretability: Developing the tools and techniques required to make the inner workings of AI models more transparent and understandable.
• Human Feedback Integration: Building methods to more tightly integrate human feedback into both the development and deployment phases of these systems.

Technical Foundation and Expertise

Anthropic is led by CEO Dario Amodei and President Daniela Amodei. The team brings a deep history of research in fundamental AI scaling and safety, with previous work on:

• Scaling Laws: Research into how model performance scales with compute and data.
• Interpretability: Work on Circuit-Based Interpretability and Multimodal Neurons.
• GPT-3: Contributions to the development of large-scale language models.
• AI Safety: Research into "Concrete Problems in AI Safety" and "Learning from Human Preferences."
• Compute: Analysis of AI and compute requirements.

Funding and Strategic Direction

Led by technology investor and Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, the Series A round included participants such as Eric Schmidt, Dustin Moskovitz, James McClave, and the Center for Emerging Risk Research.

CEO Dario Amodei stated that the company's immediate priority is fundamental research to enable the deployment of more capable and general AI systems that benefit people. The company is currently expanding its team of researchers, engineers, and operational experts to support this roadmap.