MOST startups will not be able to afford to sign up for it race, admits CEO of $18 billion Anthropic.

In a recent “In Good Company” podcast. interview with CEO of Norges Bank Nicolai Tangen, CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, delved into the developments of artificial intelligence – including how much it takes to get an AI model off the ground.

Amodi said that training an AI model costs about $100 million, but “there are models in training today that are more like a billion.”

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Amodei estimates that current prices will soon be considered lower compared to what it will cost to develop competitive AI in the coming years.

“I think if we go to $10 billion or $100 billion, and I think that's going to happen in 2025, 2026, maybe 2027… then I think there's a good chance that by then we'll be able to get models that are better than most people at most things,” Amodei said.

^{Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. Photo by Chesnot/Getty Images}

The very high price of AI development sets a high bar for startups that want to make their own models to take on OpenAI or Anthropic.

On average, US startups raised approx 59 million dollars in its fourth-stage Series C funding in Q1 2023 – far from it 450 million dollars Anthropic raised Series C in May 2023.

Anthropic is raised above 8 billion dollars to date.

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Amodei acknowledged that many companies will not be able to participate in the AI ​​race.

“Certainly, I think there's going to be a vibrant downstream ecosystem and there's going to be an ecosystem for small designs,” he said.

Anthropic's release of Claude 3 Opus in March, the latest version of its flagship AI chatbot Claude, sparked a conversation about “metacognition,” or the potential for AI to monitor its activity and correct itself. An anthropic engineer discovered at that time which Opus seemed to know when the engineers ran a test on it.

Amodei also stated in the interview that Anthropic is working on Nvidia's competing artificial intelligence chips with Google and Amazon, two companies that have invested up to 2 billion dollars AND 4 billion dollars respectively in Anthropic.

The cost of AI can also mean environmental hurdles. A Google REPORT last week revealed that its emissions rose by nearly 50% in four years due to AI.

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