Google-backed Anthropic debuts its most powerful chatbot yet, as generative AI battle heats up

Published

1 year ago

March 4, 2024

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Anthropic on Monday debuted Claude 3, a suite of artificial intelligence models that it says are its fastest and most powerful yet. The new tools are called Claude 3 Opus, Sonnet and Haiku.

The company said the most capable of the new models, Claude 3 Opus, outperformed OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Google’s Gemini Ultra on industry benchmark tests, such as undergraduate level knowledge, graduate level reasoning and basic mathematics.

This is the first time Anthropic has offered multimodal support. Users can upload photos, charts, documents and other types of unstructured data for analysis and answers.

The other models, Sonnet and Haiku, are more compact and less expensive than Opus. Sonnet and Opus are available in 159 countries starting Monday, while Haiku will be coming soon, according to Anthropic. The company declined to specify how long it took to train Claude 3 or how much it cost, but it said companies like Airtable and Asana helped A/B test the models.

This time last year, Anthropic was seen as a promising generative AI startup founded by ex-OpenAI research executives. It had completed Series A and B funding rounds, but it had only rolled out the first version of its chatbot without any consumer access or major fanfare.

Twelve months later, it’s one of the hottest AI startups, with backers including Google, Salesforce and Amazon, and a product that directly competes with ChatGPT in both the enterprise and consumer worlds. Over the past year, the startup closed five different funding deals, totaling about $7.3 billion.

The generative AI field has exploded over the past year, with a record $29.1 billion invested across nearly 700 deals in 2023, a more than 260% increase in deal value from a year earlier, according to PitchBook. It’s become the buzziest phrase on corporate earnings calls quarter after quarter. Academics and ethicists have voiced significant concerns about the technology’s tendency to propagate bias, but even so, it’s quickly made its way into schools, online travel, the medical industry, online advertising and more.

Between 60 and 80 people worked on the core AI model, while between 120 and 150 people worked on its technical aspects, Anthropic co-founder Daniela Amodei told CNBC in an interview. For the AI model’s last iteration, a team of 30 to 35 people worked directly on it, with about 150 people total supporting it, Amodei told CNBC in July.

Anthropic said Claude 3 can summarize up to about 150,00 words, or a sizeable book (think: around the length range of “Moby Dick” or “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”). Its previous version could only summarize 75,000 words. Users can input large data sets, and ask for summaries in the form of a memo, letter or story. ChatGPT, by contrast, can handle about 3,000 words.

Amodei also said Claude 3 has a better understanding of risk in responses than its previous version.

“In our quest to have a highly harmless model, Claude 2 would sometimes over-refuse,” Amodei told CNBC. “When somebody would kind of bump up against some of the spicier topics or the trust and safety guardrails, sometimes Claude 2 would trend a little bit conservative in responding to those questions.”

Claude 3 has a more nuanced understanding of prompts, according to Anthropic.

Multimodality, or adding options like photo and video capabilities to generative AI, whether uploading them yourself or creating them using an AI model, has quickly become one of the industry’s hottest use cases.

“The world is multimodal,” OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap told CNBC in November. “If you think about the way we as humans process the world and engage with the world, we see things, we hear things, we say things — the world is much bigger than text. So to us, it always felt incomplete for text and code to be the single modalities, the single interfaces that we could have to how powerful these models are and what they can do.”

But multimodality, and increasingly complex AI models, also lead to more potential risks. Google recently took its AI image generator, part of its Gemini chatbot, offline after users discovered historical inaccuracies and questionable responses, which have circulated widely on social media.

Anthropic’s Claude 3 does not generate images; instead, it only allows users to upload images and other documents for analysis.

“Of course no model is perfect, and I think that’s a very important thing to say upfront,” Amodei told CNBC. “We’ve tried very diligently to make these models the intersection of as capable and as safe as possible. Of course there are going to be places where the model still makes something up from time to time.”

Clarification: Anthropic clarified with CNBC that Claude 3 can summarize about 150,000 words, not 200,000.

Technology

British fintech Revolut tops $1 billion in profit as revenue jumps 72%

Published

3 hours ago

April 24, 2025

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British fintech Revolut tops billion in profit as revenue jumps 72%

Revolut CEO Nikolay Storonsky at the Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal, Nov. 7, 2019.

Pedro Nunes | Reuters

LONDON — British fintech firm Revolut on Thursday announced it topped $1 billion in annual profit for the first time, a major milestone for the company as it readies the launch of its U.K. bank later this year.

Revolut, which offers a range of banking and financial services via an app, said that net profit for the year ending Dec. 31, 2024, totaled £1.1 billion ($1.5 billion), up 149% year over year. Revenues at the company increased 72% year on year to £3.1 billion, driven by growth across different revenue streams.

Revolut’s wealth unit — which includes its stock-trading business — saw outsized growth, with revenue surging 298% to £506 million, while subscriptions turnover jumped 74% to £423 million.

Revolut also saw significant growth in its loan book, which grew 86% to £979 million. Coupled with a jump in customer deposits, this contributed to a 58% increase in interest income, which totaled £790 million.

UK bank rollout

Revolut’s financial milestone arrives at a critical time for the almost decade-old-firm. The digital banking unicorn has been preparing a transition to becoming a fully operational bank in the U.K. after securing a banking license last summer.

It was granted a banking license with restrictions in July 2024 from the U.K.’s Prudential Regulation Authority, bringing an end to a lengthy application process that began back in 2021.

The restricted license means that Revolut is now in the “mobilization” stage, where it is focusing on building out its banking operations and infrastructure in the run-up to a full launch. The period typically lasts about 12 months.

Revolut is still awaiting approval from regulators to transfer all 11 million of its U.K. users to a new banking entity this summer. Once fully up and running, the firm will be able to begin offering loans, overdrafts and mortgages, opening up the path to new income streams.

‘Customers trust banks’

Victor Stinga, Revolut’s chief financial officer, told CNBC on Thursday that the company’s aim is to formally launch its U.K. bank later this year.

“As you can imagine, at this scale, it’s a thorough process, and we just pay a lot of attention to it,” Stinga said. “We work very closely on a close contact with the PRA [Prudential Regulation Authority] and the FCA [Financial Conduct Authority] on it. We feel like we’re making great progress on it.”

Stinga said that a big advantage of becoming a bank in the U.K. is ability to start accepting deposits protected by government guarantees. Licensed banks are covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme, which means their customers can claim up to £85,000 if a lender goes out of business.

“Customers trust banks, so it means customers on this transition will use Revolut as a primary bank account,” Stinga said.

Lending is arguably “the biggest roadmap item that this unlocks,” Revolut’s CFO said, adding that the firm is looking at launching credit cards and personal loans, similar to the products it already offers in the European Union under a separate EU banking license.

Francesca Carlesi, Revolut’s U.K. boss, previously told the Wall Street Journal that Revolut views its journey to becoming a U.K. bank as a crucial step in its global expansion and eventual IPO. “My main strategic focus is making Revolut the primary bank for everybody in the U.K.,” she told the WSJ.

It has a steep hill to climb — rivals Monzo and Starling have had a lengthy head start on Revolut. Monzo obtained its full banking license in 2017, while Starling was granted its own permit in 2016.

Technology

SK Hynix quarterly profit soars 158% to top estimates as chip demand surges on AI boom

Published

10 hours ago

April 23, 2025

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SK Hynix quarterly profit soars 158% to top estimates as chip demand surges on AI boom

Illustration of the SK Hynix company logo seen displayed on a smartphone screen.

Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

South Korea’s SK Hynix on Thursday topped quarterly revenue and operating profit estimates, with demand for its high bandwidth memory offerings used in generative artificial intelligence chipsets remaining robust.

Here are SK Hynix’s first-quarter results versus LSEG SmartEstimates:

Revenue: 17.64 trillion won ($12.36 billion) vs. 17.26 trillion won
Operating profit: 7.44 trillion won vs. 6.62 trillion won

Revenue rose about 42% in the March quarter compared with the same period a year earlier, while operating profit surged 158%, year on year.

On a quarter-on-quarter basis, revenue dropped 11%, while operating profit fell 8% from a record high in the December quarter.

The company warned that macroeconomic uncertainties including tariff policy have created demand volatility that will impact the second half of the year.

SK Hynix is a leading supplier of dynamic random access memory — a type of semiconductor memory found in PCs, workstations and servers that is used to store data and program code.

In its earnings release, SK Hynix said that its first-quarter profits demonstrated AI’s impact in the memory market as well as company’s leading position.

The memory chipmaker expects Big Tech’s spending on AI to continue, with the ecosystem’s expansion to be driven by open-source AI model offerings, and “sovereign AI projects” that will stoke memory demand.

SK Hynix has benefitted from a boom in artificial intelligence servers as a key supplier of high bandwidth memory, or HBM — a type of DRAM used in artificial intelligence servers — to clients such as the U.S. AI darling Nvidia. Micron Technology and Samsung Electronics are the other players in the space.

A report from Counterpoint Research earlier this month said that SK Hynix had captured 70% of the HBM market by revenue share in the first quarter.

This HBM dominance helped it overtake Samsung in the overall DRAM market for the first time ever, with a 36% global market share as compared to Samsung’s 34%, the report added.

Technology

Trump meme coin surges 50% after top holders offered dinner with the president

Published

13 hours ago

April 23, 2025

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Trump meme coin surges 50% after top holders offered dinner with the president

A cartoon image of US President-elect Donald Trump with cryptocurrency tokens, depicted in front of the White House to mark his inauguration, displayed at a Coinhero store in Hong Kong, China, on Monday, Jan. 20, 2025.

Paul Yeung | Bloomberg | Getty Images

The $TRUMP meme coin jumped more than 50% on Wednesday after the top 220 holders of the token were promised dinner with the president.

“Have Dinner in Washington, D.C. With President Trump,” reads a message on the front page of the Trump coin’s website. The dinner — black tie optional — is scheduled for May 22, with a reception for the top 25 wallets. A “VIP White House Tour” will take place the following day, the site says.

The price spike gives the $TRUMP coins in circulation a total value of $2.7 billion. It had by far the biggest move of any cryptocurrency, outpacing Sui, which is up 23%, according to CoinMarketCap.