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.
Mario poses at the “SUPER NINTENDO WORLD” welcome celebration at Universal Studios Hollywood on February 16, 2023 in Universal City, California.
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Nintendo on Tuesday cut forecast for Switch sales for its fiscal year ending March 2025 as demand wanes for its ageing console.
The Japanese gaming giant said it now expects to sell 12.5 million units of the Switch over the course of the period. That’s down from a previous forecast of 13.5 million units.
Nintendo has been contending with fading demand for its flagship Switch console, which is now more than seven years old.
Investors are waiting for news surrounding a successor to the Switch, which they hope will re-energize Nintendo’s gaming business. In the past, the company said that the Switch successor will be announced in its current fiscal year, which ends in March 2025.
Nintendo also cut full fiscal year forecasts for sales and operating profit. The company said it now expects sales of 1.28 trillion yen versus a previous forecast of 1.35 trillion yen. The operating profit outlook for the period was slashed from 400 billion yen to 360 billion yen.
Here’s how Nintendo did in its fiscal second quarter ended Sept. 30 versus LSEG estimates:
Revenue: 276.7 billion Japanese yen ($1.8 billion), compared with 273.34 billion yen expected.
Net profit: 27.7 billion yen, versus 48.06 billion yen expected.
Revenue fell 17% year-on-year. Net profit plunged just over 69% versus the same period last year.
Super Mario, Zelda boost fading
The Switch is Nintendo’s second best-selling console in history, behind the Nintendo DS. Despite the recent fall in sales, Nintendo has prolonged the console’s appeal for an extended period of time since its launch in 2017 by relying on its recognizable characters.
In its last fiscal year, Nintendo managed to reinvigorate sales of the Switch thanks to the the success of the “Super Mario Bros. Movie” and the highly anticipated release of the “The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom” game, which underscored the appeal of its iconic characters.
But that effect is fading.
On Tuesday, Nintendo noted the boost that the company received in the first half of its last fiscal year, but said “there were no such special factors in the first half of this fiscal year, and with Nintendo Switch now in its eighth year since launch, unit sales of both hardware and software decreased significantly year-on-year.”
Sales of the Switch totaled 4.72 units in the six months ended Sept. 30, compared with 6.84 million units in the same period of last year.
In the face of falling sales, Nintendo has tried to license out its intellectual property for use everywhere, from movies to theme parks. A new Super Mario movie is slated for release in 2026.
Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg plans to visit South Korea, scheduling key meetings during the trip, according to a statement by Meta on Wednesday, which did not provide further details. Reportedly, Zuckerberg is anticipated to meet with Samsung Electronics chairman Jay Y. Lee later this month to discuss AI chip supply and other generative AI issues, as per the South Korean newspaper Seoul Economic Daily, citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter.
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Meta extended its ban on new political ads on Facebook and Instagram past Election Day in the U.S.
The social media giant announced the political ads policy update on Monday, extending its ban on new political ads past Tuesday, the original end date for the restriction period.
Meta did not specify the day it will lift the restriction, saying only that the ad blocking will continue “until later this week.” The company did not say why it extended the political advertising restriction period.
The company announced in August that any political ads that ran at least once before Oct. 29 would still be allowed to run on Meta’s services in the final week before Election Day. Other political ads will not be allowed to run.
Organization with eligible ads will have “limited editing capabilities” while the restriction is still in place, Meta said. Those advertisers will be allowed to make scheduling, budgeting and bidding-related changes to their political ads, Meta said.
Meta enacted the same policy in 2020. The company said the policy is in place because “we recognize there may not be enough time to contest new claims made in ads.”
Google-parent Alphabet announced a similar ad policy update last month, saying it would pause ads relating to U.S. elections from running in the U.S. after the last polls close on Tuesday. Alphabet said it would notify advertisers when it lifts the pause.
Nearly $1 billion has been spent on political ads over the last week, with the bulk of the money spent on down-ballot races throughout the U.S., according to data from advertising analytics firm AdImpact.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, attends the 54th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland, January 18, 2024 (L), and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos speaks during the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow, Scotland, Britain, November 2, 2021.
Reuters
Physical Intelligence, a robot startup based in San Francisco, has raised $400 million at a $2.4 billion post-money valuation, the company confirmed Monday to CNBC.
Investors included Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, OpenAI, Thrive Capital and Lux Capital, a Physical Intelligence spokesperson said. Khosla Ventures and Sequoia Capital are also listed as investors on the company’s website.
Physical Intelligence’s new valuation is about six times that of its March seed round, which reportedly came in at $70 million with a $400 million valuation. Its current roster of employees includes alumni of Tesla, Google DeepMind and X.
The startup focuses on “bringing general-purpose AI into the physical world,” per its website, and it aims to do this by developing large-scale artificial intelligence models and algorithms to power robots. The startup spent the past eight months developing a “general-purpose” AI model for robots, the company wrote in a blog post. Physical Intelligence hopes that model will be the first step toward its ultimate goal of developing artificial general intelligence. AGI is a term used to describe AI technology that equals or surpasses human intellect on a wide range of tasks.
Physical Intelligence’s vision is that one day users can “simply ask robots to perform any task they want, just like they can ask large language models (LLMs) and chatbot assistants,” the startup wrote in the blog post. In case studies, Physical Intelligence details how its tech could allow a robot to do laundry, bus tables or assemble a box.