With Anthropic gaining momentum in the booming AI market, OpenAI sent a memo to investors this week slamming its chief rival for "operating on a meaningfully smaller curve," and characterizing the company as compute constrained.
OpenAI said it's planning to have 30 gigawatts of compute by 2030, while it expects Anthropic to have roughly 7 to 8 gigawatts by the end of 2027, according to the memo, which was viewed by CNBC.
"Even at the high end of that range, our ramp is materially ahead and widening," OpenAI said. Bloomberg was first to report on the memo.
OpenAI's concern with Anthropic is building as the companies battle for positioning in the rapidly evolving market for large language models and artificial intelligence services. The two companies are collectively valued at over $1 trillion and both are gearing up for IPOs, potentially this year, while trying to convince investors that they have sustainable business models that can withstand the pressure of going up against cash-rich companies like Google and Meta.
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by CEO Dario Amodei and a group of researchers and executives who defected from OpenAI. Earlier this week, Anthropic, which has been winning in the enterprise market, announced a powerful new model that will roll out to a select group of companies as part of a new cybersecurity initiative called Project Glasswing.
In the investor memo, OpenAI pointed to Amodei's comments about his deliberately conservative compute strategy, writing that its own approach is "different."
"Each new generation of infrastructure lets us train more capable models, making every token more intelligent than the one before," OpenAI wrote. "At the same time, algorithmic gains and hardware improvements reduce the cost to serve each token, lowering the cost per unit of intelligence."
OpenAI, which kicked off the generative AI blitz with the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, said it benefits from "compounding advantage," with better infrastructure and models lowering costs, and superior products leading to higher revenue.
"This leverage also enables OpenAI to continue democratizing AI by making our tools available to hundreds of millions of people for free and being more generous with builders, passing that capacity on to the people who are creating and solving problems with our tools," the company said.
Anthropic didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
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