Red hot artificial intelligence startup Anthropic PBC is projecting that it will now achieve an $850 million annualized revenue run rate by the end of 2024, significantly greater than an earlier forecast it made just three months ago.

Back in September, the company told investors it was generating revenue at a $100 million annualized run rate, and expected that number to top $500 million by the end of next year. A report by The Information today said the new estimate comes from two people with knowledge of the company’s finances, but it didn’t say why the new projection is materially higher than the last.

Anthropic, which is backed by Amazon.com Inc. and Google LLC, is one of a number of high-profile AI startups attempting to take on OpenAI in the generative AI industry. The best known generative AI model is ChatGPT, which is renowned for its ability to create humanlike responses to text and audio prompts.

Anthropic’s answer to ChatGPT is Claude, which many say is just as impressive. The company’s most recent model is Claude 2, and it’s designed to compete with GPT-4, which powers the latest version of ChatGPT. Besides responding to basic questions, it can generate marketing copy, solve mathematical problems, write original software code and more.

The startup was founded by siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, who previously worked at OpenAI. One of the main differentiators between Claude 2 and rival models is that it has the ability to process more complex prompts containing up to 100,000 tokens, which is a unit in AI that corresponds to characters and numbers. The more tokens, the more data that can be processed.

In contrast, GPT-4 is only able to process up to 8,000 tokens. As such, Anthropic argues that Claude 2 has a much higher capacity for summarizing long documents.

The Information’s report added that some people who are close to the company believe its annualized revenue could reach as much as $1 billion by the end of 2024, amounting to $83 million per month in sales.

In addition to generating its own dollars, Anthropic is also said to be holding talks over an additional $750 million funding round that would be led by Menlo Ventures, according to a report from The Information last week. The new round will reportedly bring Anthropic’s valuation to a cool $15 billion.

The startup has already raised several billion dollars in funding, with Amazon and Google agreeing to invest $4 billion and $2 billion, respectively, in the past few months. Prior to that, it raised $300 million from Google in an earlier round in March, which was followed by a $450 million Series C round led by Spark Capital in May. Sapphire Ventures LLC committed $1 billion to the startup in June, while South Korean telecommunications firm SK Telecom Co. Ltd. said in August it would invest $100 million.

The latest revenue projection appears to justify the confidence of those investors in Anthropic’s growth projections, and provides yet more evidence that generative AI is rapidly gaining steam in the enterprise.

Image: Anthropic