Decart would have been kind of a funny company for Anthropic to buy, which is why it was newsworthy when Bloomberg reported that Anthropic was looking to do so. Last month, I wrote that Bloomberg’s initial reporting on this story was “one of those anonymously-sourced Bloomberg articles you can’t help but suspect might exist solely to help out one or another side in an ongoing negotiation,” and I finished by saying, “the deal could still crumble.”
So what have we learned now that, according to Bloomberg, it has?
To remind you, this is Anthropic’s vibe:
And here is Decart’s vibe:
Decart is an intriguing company. Its marquee products are the flashy “world models” Lucy and Oasis. Both make for eye-popping demos. Its Lucy model allows for real-time replacement and editing of major details—like entire faces—in high quality video, allowing one to, say, replace themself on a Twitch stream with a high-resolution facsimile of an anime character. Oasis, meanwhile, can accept images as inputs and generate playable “worlds” in the form of what are essentially first-person-shooter video games (minus the shooting).
Anthropic’s interest in this would almost certainly have been the underlying tech powering Lucy and Oasis: DOS or the Decart Optimization Stack, which purportedly optimizes the interactions between AI hardware and software, cutting down on compute cost. Anthropic spends a lot on compute, and is planning what may soon be the world’s largest IPO, now rumored to be coming around Halloween.
According to Bloomberg’s anonymous sources, Anthropic “performed due diligence on Decart, but ultimately walked away.” But one of them added that, in Bloomberg’s words, Anthropic and Decart, “may still pursue other opportunities to collaborate.”
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