By Stacy Liberatore For Dailymail.com
20:50 27 Oct 2023, updated 22:03 27 Oct 2023
- Google reportedly invested $2 billion in AI startup that rivals OpenAI’s ChatGPT
- The startup was recently hit with a lawsuit for distributing song lyrics
- READ MORE: Expert says there’s a 50% chance AI will wipe out humanity
Google is placing a huge bet on an artificial intelligence start-up whose owners have admitted it could wipe out humanity.
The tech giant’s parent company, Alphabet, has reportedly committed $2 billion in funding to Anthropic, a startup that develops AI systems.
Anthropic is seen as one of the biggest rivals to OpenAI, behind the hugely popular ChatGPT that took the world by storm this past year – leaving Google’s Bard in the dust.
Anthropic’s CEO and co-founder, Dario Amodei said earlier this week that AI has a ’10 to 25 percent’ chance of destroying humanity.
The report has claimed an upfront $500 million has already been invested into the startup, and the rest will be allocated over time.
The whooping investment comes just one month after Amazon invested $4 billion in Anthropic, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Google and Microsoft, a major backer of OpenAI, and Amazon are racing to perfect and control the AI space, which many have dubbed a second technological revolution.
And it seems Anthropic is two of the three company’s ticket to the top.
However, the San Francisco-based startup might not be all it seems.
Amodei was previously the OpenAI’s vice president of research before jumping ship to build his own AI to take on ChatGPT.
In less than three years, his new company has grown to be worth more than $5 billion.
Speaking on the Logan Bartlett Show tech podcast, Amodei said: ‘My chance that something goes really quite catastrophically wrong on the scale of human civilization might be somewhere between 10 percent and 25 percent.’
Amodei added: ‘That means there is a 75 percent to 90 percent chance that this technology is developed and everything goes fine.’
But there is also the fact that Anthropic was hit with a lawsuit by Universal Music Group and other major record labels on October 18.
The suit claims that Anthropic used its AI tool to distribute copyrighted lyrics without a licensing deal.
Jason Peterson, the CEO of GoDigital Media Group, a media and technology company focused on intellectual property rights management, told Axios: ‘This copying to storage for use in AI training is a likely clear-cut case of infringement, and the courts will put a stop to it.’