Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of artificial intelligence startup Anthropic.
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Anthropic, the Amazon-backed AI startup founded by former OpenAI research executives, announced Tuesday that it’s reached an artificial intelligence milestone for the company: AI agents that can use a computer to complete complex tasks like a human would.
Anthropic is the company behind Claude — one of the chatbots that, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, has exploded in popularity. Startups like Anthropic, alongside tech giants such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta, are all part of a generative AI arms race to ensure they don’t fall behind in a market predicted to top $1 trillion in revenue within a decade.
Anthropic’s new Computer Use capability, part of its two newest AI models, allows its tech to interpret what’s on a computer screen, select buttons, enter text, navigate websites and execute tasks through any software and real-time internet browsing.
The tool can “use computers in basically the same way that we do,” Jared Kaplan, Anthropic’s chief science officer, told CNBC in an interview, adding it can do tasks with “tens or even hundreds of steps.”
Amazon had early access to the tool, Anthropic told CNBC, and early customers and beta testers included Asana, Canva and Notion. The company has been working on the tool since early this year, according to Kaplan.
Anthropic released the feature Tuesday in public beta for developers. The team hopes to open up use to consumers and enterprise clients over the next few months, or early next year, per Kaplan.
Anthropic said that future consumer applications include booking flights, scheduling appointments, filling out forms, conducting online research and filing expense reports.
“We want Claude to be able to actually assist people with all sorts of different kinds of work, and we think the chatbot setup is fairly limited because you can ask a question and [get] context but it stops there,” Kaplan told CNBC.
What is an AI agent?
After the viral popularity of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the industry quickly moved past text responses into AI-generated photos, videos and voice. Now, startups and Big Tech alike are going all in on AI agents.
Rather than just providing answers — the realm of chatbots and image generators — agents are built for productivity and to complete multistep, complex tasks on a user’s behalf. And though the term isn’t neatly defined across the tech sector, AI agents are viewed as a step beyond chatbots, in that they’re typically designed for specific business functions and can be customized on large AI models. Think of J.A.R.V.I.S., Tony Stark’s multifaceted AI assistant from the Marvel Universe.
Grace Isford, a partner at venture firm Lux Capital, told CNBC in June that there’s been a “dramatic increase” in interest among tech investors in startups focused on building AI agents. They’ve collectively raised hundreds of millions of dollars and seen their valuations climb alongside the broader generative AI market.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said on an earnings call earlier this year that he wants to offer an AI agent that can complete more tasks on a user’s behalf, though there is “a lot of execution ahead.” Executives from Meta and Google have also touted their work in pushing AI agents to become increasingly productive.
Anthropic is competing with OpenAI on multiple fronts
Anthropic has become one of the hottest AI startups since it released the first version of Claude in March 2023, a product that directly competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT in both the enterprise and consumer markets, without any consumer access or major fanfare. Backers include Google, Salesforce and Amazon, Since January, it has introduced iOS and Android apps, a Team plan for businesses, and an international expansion into Europe.
″[We’re] moving to a world where these models will behave much more like virtual collaborators than virtual assistants,” Scott White, a product manager at Anthropic, told CNBC in September.
Anthropic’s Tuesday announcements are the latest step in its long-term strategy to build those virtual collaborators, or agents.
Last month, Anthropic rolled out Claude Enterprise, its biggest new product since its chatbot’s debut, designed for businesses looking to integrate Anthropic’s AI. The enterprise product’s beta testers and early clients included GitLab, Midjourney and Menlo Ventures, according to the company.
Claude Enterprise allows clients to upload relevant documents with a much larger context window than before — the equivalent of 100 30-minute sales conversations, 100,000 lines of code or 15 full financial reports, according to Anthropic. The plan also allows “activity feeds” for super-users within a company to show those newer to AI how others are using the technology, White said.
In June, Anthropic also announced “Artifacts,” which it said allows a user to ask its Claude chatbot to, for example, generate a text document or code and then opens the result in a dedicated window.
Artifacts, or “workspaces” that allow users to “see, edit and build upon Claude’s creations in real time,” White told CNBC in September, will allow Anthropic’s enterprise-level clients to create marketing calendars, feed in sales data, make dashboards or forecasts, draft code for features, write legal documents, summarize complex contracts, automate legal tasks and more.
Shortly after Anthropic’s debut of Teams in May, Mike Krieger, co-founder and former chief technology officer of Meta-owned Instagram, joined the company as chief product officer. Under Krieger, the platform grew to 1 billion users and its engineering team increased to more than 450 people, according to a press release. OpenAI’s former safety leader, Jan Leike, joined the company that same month.
Bluesky has surged in popularity since the presidential election earlier this month, suddenly becoming a competitor to Elon Musk’s X and Meta’s Threads. But CEO Jay Graber has some cautionary words for potential acquirers: Bluesky is “billionaire proof.”
In an interview on Thursday with CNBC’s “Money Movers,” Graber said Bluesky’s open design is intended to give users the option of leaving the service with all of their followers, which could thwart potential acquisition efforts.
“The billionaire proof is in the way everything is designed, and so if someone bought or if the Bluesky company went down, everything is open source,” Graber said. “What happened to Twitter couldn’t happen to us in the same ways, because you would always have the option to immediately move without having to start over.”
Graber was referring to the way millions of users left Twitter, now X, after Musk purchased the company in 2022. Bluesky now has over 21 million users, still dwarfed by X and Threads, which Facebook’s parent debuted in July 2023.
X and Meta didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
Threads has roughly 275 million monthly users, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in October. Although Musk said in May that X has 600 million monthly users, market intelligence firm Sensor Tower estimates 318 million monthly users as of October.
Bluesky was created in 2019 as an internal Twitter project during Jack Dorsey’s second stint as CEO, and became an independent public benefit corporation in 2022. In May of this year, Dorsey said he is no longer a member of Bluesky’s board.
“In 2019, Jack had a vision for something better for social media, and so that’s why he chose me to build this, and we’re really thankful for him for setting this up, and we’ve continued to carry this out,” said Graber, who previously founded Happening, a social network focused on events. “We’re building an open-source social network that anyone can take into their own hands and build on, and it’s something that is radically different from anything that’s been done in social media before. Nobody’s been this open, this transparent and put this much control in the users hands.”
Part of Bluesky’s business plan involves offering subscriptions that would let users access special features, Graber noted. She also said that Bluesky will add more services for third-party coders as part of the startup’s “developer ecosystem.”
Graber said Bluesky has ruled out the possibility of letting advertisers send algorithmically recommended ads to users.
“There’s a lot on the road map, and I’ll tell you what we’re not going to do for monetization,” Graber said. “We’re not going to build an algorithm that just shoves ads at you, locking users in. That’s not our model.”
Bluesky has previously experienced major growth spurts. In September, it added 2 million users following X’s suspension in Brazil over content moderation policy violations in the country and related legal matters.
In October, Bluesky announced that it raised $15 million in a funding round led by Blockchain Capital. The company has raised a total of $36 million, according to Pitchbook.
Alphabet shares slid 6% Thursday, following news that the Department of Justice is calling for Google to divest its Chrome browser to put an end to its search monopoly.
The proposed break-up would, according to the DOJ in its Wednesday filing, “permanently stop Google’s control of this critical search access point and allow rival search engines the ability to access the browser that for many users is a gateway to the internet.”
This development is the latest in a years-long, bipartisan antitrust case that found in an August ruling that the search giant held an illegal monopoly in both search and text advertising, violating Section 2 of the Sherman Act.
The potential break-up would include preventing Google from entering into exclusionary agreements with competitors like Apple and Samsung, part of a set of remedies that would last 10 years.
POLAND – 2024/11/13: In this photo illustration, the NVIDIA company logo is seen displayed on a smartphone screen. (Photo Illustration by Piotr Swat/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
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Nvidia shares dropped in U.S. premarket trading Thursday after the tech giant’s third-quarter earnings failed to impress investors.
Shares of the chipmaker slumped 3.21% at around 5:03 a.m. ET, following the Wednesday release of Nvidia’s quarterly results, which beat on both the top and bottom lines.
Revenue came in at $35.08 billion, up 94% year-on-year and exceeding the $33.16 billion forecast by LSEG analysts. Earnings per share was 81 cents adjusted, also above analyst expectations.
Other chipmakers fell on the back of the market reaction to Nvidia’s third-quarter results. Shares of Intel, Qualcomm and Micron Technology all lost 1% or more in value, while AMD declined 0.6%.
The slump in Nvidia also had a knock-on effect on European semiconductor firms. ASML, a key chip equipment supplier, dropped 0.9%, while compatriot Dutch chip firm ASMI fell 0.5%. Chipmakers BE Semiconductor, STMicroelectronics and Infineon slipped 0.8%, 0.7 and 0.6%, respectively.
Several notable chip names were also in negative territory in Asia. TSMC, which makes Nvidia’s high-performance graphics processing units, eased as much as 1.5%. Contract electronics manufacturer Foxconn dropped 1.9%.
Why are Nvidia shares falling?
Nvidia has largely cornered the market for the high-powered chips powering the world’s most advanced artificial intelligence models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Despite nearly doubling sales year-on-year, Nvidia’s third-quarter results showed a slowdown from previous quarters. Nvidia previously reported growth of 122% in the second quarter, 262% in the first quarter, and 265% in the fourth quarter of 2023.
Derren Nathan, head of equity research at Hargreaves Lansdown, said in emailed comments Wednesday that the dip in Nvidia’s share price “suggests even outstanding isn’t enough for some investors,” adding that he expects the stock to bounce back once markets open.
“NVIDIA’s generated stellar gains for shareholders over many years now, and right now it’s pretty hard to see any major holes in the investment case,” Nathan added.
Analysts are looking ahead to the much-anticipated launch of Nvidia’s next-generation chip called Blackwell. On the firm’s earnings call, CEO Jensen Huang said that demand for the chip is exceeding supply.
