Hersa Bayes AI Investment Landscape Revealed: Stealthily Invests in Anthropic with DeepMind's Help, Already Raised $14 Billion

According to DataBeat monitoring, The Financial Times revealed that Demis Hassabis, the founder of Google's AI lab DeepMind, is an early angel investor in competitor Anthropic, sparking industry shockwaves with this previously undisclosed stake. As one of the current world's most valuable AI unicorns, Anthropic has just agreed to a new funding round of $300 billion at a valuation of $900 billion.

Anthropic's founder and CEO, Dario Amodei, has always seen Hassabis as a role model. At the company level, Google has already invested billions of dollars in Anthropic as part of a strategic cloud services and AI collaboration.

This is not the first time Hassabis has invested in a former colleague's startup. Since selling DeepMind to Google for £4 billion in 2014, he has frequently invested in former colleagues' entrepreneurial projects as an individual, including Inflection AI founded by former DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman, Ineffable Intelligence established by long-time collaborator David Silver, and the UK startup accelerator Entrepreneurs First.

Hassabis's personal angel investments are intertwined with the exodus of talent from DeepMind, reflecting the complex power dynamics of the AI golden generation. These top talents are not only direct business competitors but also weave a closely intertwined network of interests through capital and connections.

Data shows that since 2021, former DeepMind researchers have founded more than a dozen AI companies, raising at least $14 billion in total. Representatives include drug development company Isomorphic Labs and Silver's Ineffable Intelligence, which have raised over $3 billion in the past month alone; in addition, there is significant involvement of DeepMind alumni in well-known startups such as Mistral AI, legal AI unicorn Harvey, and new material search engine Cusp.ai.

Corresponding to the talent outflow, DeepMind's core executives are now taking full control of Google's AI business. Last year, Chief Technology Officer Koray Kavukcuoglu was promoted to Google's Chief AI Architect; last month, Pushmeet Kohli, who led the AlphaFold project, was appointed Google Cloud's Chief Scientist.

While Hassabis's power within Google has reached its peak, DeepMind still refuses to move to Silicon Valley, remaining steadfast in London's King's Cross area and driving a burgeoning European AI innovation industry.