Anthropic PBC, an artificial intelligence startup, predicts that it will achieve an annual revenue operating rate of $850 million by the end of 2024, significantly higher than its early forecast made three months ago.

As early as September, the company informed investors that it was making $100 million in annual revenue operating rate and expected this number to exceed $500 million by the end of next year. Today, Information reports that the new estimate comes from two individuals familiar with the company's financial situation, but it does not explain why the new forecast is significantly higher than the previous one.

Anthropic has received support from Amazon and Google and is one of the well-known AI startups challenging OpenAI in the generative AI industry. The most famous generative AI model is ChatGPT, which is known for its ability to generate human-like responses to text and audio instructions.

Anthropic's answer to ChatGPT is Claude, which many people find equally impressive. The company's latest model is Claude 2, which aims to compete with GPT-4, the latest version of ChatGPT. In addition to answering basic questions, it can also generate marketing copy, solve math problems, and write original software code.

This startup was founded by siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, who previously worked at OpenAI. One major difference between Claude 2 and competing models is its ability to handle more complex prompts with up to 100,000 tokens, where tokens correspond to characters and numbers in AI. The more tokens, the more data it can process.

In contrast, GPT-4 can only handle up to 8,000 tokens. Therefore, Anthropic believes that Claude 2 has higher capability in summarizing long documents.

Some believe that by the end of 2024, the company's annual revenue could reach $1 billion, equivalent to a monthly sales volume of $83 million.

In addition to generating its own revenue, Anthropic is reportedly in negotiations for an additional $750 million funding round led by Menlo Ventures. The new funding round is said to bring Anthropic's valuation to $15 billion.

This startup has already raised billions of dollars, with Amazon and Google committing $4 billion and $2 billion respectively in the past few months. Prior to that, it raised $300 million from Google in a funding round in March, followed by $450 million in a Series C funding round led by Spark Capital in May. Sapphire Ventures LLC pledged to invest $1 billion in the startup in June, while SK Telecom Co. Ltd. from South Korea announced a $100 million investment in August.

The latest revenue forecast seems to validate investors' confidence in Anthropic's growth prospects and provides further evidence of the rapid development of generative AI in the enterprise.