Technology

➚ MOVE FAST: Sunlight. We’ll get to see whether investors care about how a company uses AI. Apple and Disney lost bids to exclude shareholder proposals requiring reports on the issue The SEC said those measures must be put on the ballot for the companies’ annual meeting.

➘ BREAK THINGS: Shade. SpaceX is fighting back against the U.S. labor board. The company sued the agency in federal court, arguing that the body’s finding that SpaceX illegally fired eight employees, who were critical of boss Elon Musk, was unconstitutional.

The folks at Google DeepMind have been making big leaps in robotics and open-sourcing datasets to democratize robotic development. It’s gotten so good that DeepMind thought it was time to come up with a “Robot Constitution” based on Isaac Asimov’s three laws of robotics. Essentially, the constitution, published Thursday, pre-programs robots to value safety above all else.

If you’ve been following large language models, this might sound familiar. AI companies like Anthropic have been pushing a safety technique called constitutional AI. Similarly, DeepMind is trying to generalize the training of robots. Rather than teaching robots specific tasks, you can feed them data and get them to learn on their own. They’re not taking pre-orders for your Jetsons-style home robot assistant quite yet, though.

Why lower was better for Anthropic

THE SCOOP

An unusual financial structure has led hot AI startup Anthropic to downplay its own value, highlighting the way some of the top companies in the industry are following new playbooks on how to build and fund companies.

Instead of widely opening up itself to new backers as it seeks to raise $750 million, which would be typical for a buzzy upstart, Anthropic went with existing investor Menlo Ventures as its lead financial support, people familiar with the effort said.

It also aimed to peg its worth somewhere between $15 billion and $20 billion, compared to the previous $5 billion. (In any other world, this would be considered a very big valuation jump, but this is the supercharged world of AI).

What has held it back is partly the terms of previous investments, which allow financial backers to gain more shares if Anthropic’s valuation reached certain thresholds, the people said. That incentivized the startup founded by former OpenAI employees to raise its market value only by so much.

From the outside, the fundraising looked a little strange to some people in the tech industry. But that’s partly because of how companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are structured. Along with traditional investments, they’ve also sought funding from cloud computing companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google.

Some of those investments come in the form of “cloud credits” or contracts. In essence, they got funding under the condition that a large portion would be spent on compute power. That has muddied the waters a bit, making it appear as if the cloud companies own a larger percentage of the companies than they do in reality, according to people familiar with the deals.

Some people in Silicon Valley wondered whether Anthropic was having trouble raising funds, given the amount of money it had raised compared to its valuation. OpenAI, by comparison, is reportedly raising at a $100 billion valuation. Anthropic is also one of the hottest tech companies in the industry with some of the top AI researchers in the business, though it has only recently begun building up its sales operation.

What’s also unusual is that Menlo structured its investment as a special purpose vehicle, with some of the other backers coming from the venture capital firm’s limited partners, who wanted to put money directly into Anthropic.

Startups normally would rather have a direct investment than an SPV because it’s the cleanest option. Anthropic was ultimately ok with the structure, partly because Menlo has been a key driver of new customers for the startup’s foundation models, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The Information first reported Anthropic’s latest fundraising round.

The number of paid subscribers for Snapchat+, the company’s $3.99-per-month premium offering that includes access to generative AI bots and image-generation tools. That’s up from 2 million in September. Could Snap, the elder millennial app supplanted by TikTok, be onto something?

Open for business. While the CEO drama at OpenAI has faded, there are still plenty of reasons to keep an eye on the company. One is that the firm is planning to launch its GPT store next week, after the November turmoil set it back a bit. If the store is successful, it could be a significant step in the company’s ability to build network effects to fend off competitors. The store would leverage the creativity of OpenAI users to create specialized bots called “GPTs” that could be used for specific tasks.

Silicon Valley visitor. EU antitrust chief and Big Tech critic Margrethe Vestager will meet the chief executives of Apple, Alphabet, Nvidia, and other executives during a swing through the Bay area next week.

We’ve covered several examples of how AI is beginning to match or even surpass human eyes in detecting diseases like breast cancer. A new example out of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, published in the Journal of the American Heart Association, is an example of how AI can use completely different, possibly more accessible methods, to screen for disease. Researchers had success detecting heart problems in the right ventricle — a particularly vexing medical challenge — using a deep learning model to analyze ECG data.

What’s so interesting is that this method is not even used by doctors at all. While it still needs to be further studied before it’s put into practice, it could save lives and it’s an exciting example of what the future of medicine might look like as AI models improve.

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