Anthropic, which was formed by a group of safety-conscious defectors from OpenAI, spent 2023 establishing itself as one of just a handful of envelope-pushing developers of commercial AI models.
The company raised almost $7 billion in 2023 (from Amazon and Google, among others), and last October it told investors that it was generating revenue at a $100 million annualized run rate. In July, the startup launched the second major release of its LLM, dubbed Claude 2, with improved performance on standardized tests, a larger memory for text input, and improved computer coding ability.
Numerous AI app developers use Claude 2’s API (often alongside those of other state-of-the-art models) for its unique skills in text summary and generation. On the safety side, the company implemented a novel way of keeping Claude away from toxic or dangerous content—an approach the company calls “Constitutional AI.”
Instead of laboriously providing a model with human feedback, the researchers give a model a list of general principles (a “constitution”) to follow when creating its responses. A second AI then monitors the first, continually critiquing how well it follows the principles.
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