It’s been another momentous week in AI, with important product updates, mammoth investments and plenty of innovation shown off at MWC ’25. Here’s this week’s roundup.
Anthropic’s $61.5B Valuation After Claude 3.7
Anthropic secured $3.5 billion in funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, tripling its valuation following the launch of Claude 3.7 Sonnet. Krishna Rao, Anthropic’s CFO looked forard to further reinvestment in the leading genAI engine:
This investment fuels our development of more intelligent and capable AI systems that expand what humans can achieve.
Claude 3.7 Sonnet has achieved very impressive benchmark results, particularly in coding (70.3%), graduate-level reasoning (84.8%), and instruction-following (93.2%).
Creative AI Showdown
OpenAI’s Sora video generation system launches with comprehensive editing capabilities, competing directly with Alibaba’s recently released Wan 2.1. Sora integrates with existing ChatGPT subscription tiers, ranging from $20/month to $200/month for professional features.
OpenAI’s Expensive Stepping Stone
GPT-4.5 (codenamed “Orion”) appears more placeholder than destination, with GPT-5 confirmed for later this year. At 30 times the cost of GPT-4o, it suggests diminishing returns for traditional scaling approaches, with co-founder Ilya Sutskever acknowledging: “We’ve achieved peak data…pre-training as we know it will unquestionably end.”
AI Assistants: The Shifting Landscape
Amazon’s Alexa+ is gaining traction with its subscription model for conversational capabilities, while Apple’s Siri update remains distant. Bank of America suggests Amazon could generate $600 million annually if just 10% of users subscribe.
Some Reddit users weren’t too happy about the state of the AI assistant market; many choosing to create their own ‘ecosystems’ of smaller, more specialised assistants.
