Anthropic
On Tuesday, Anthropic introduced Claude, a large language model (LLM) that can generate text, write code, and function as an AI assistant similar to ChatGPT. The model stems from fundamental concerns about the future AI safety and Anthropic trained it using a technique it calls “Constitutional AI.”
Two versions of the AI model, Claude and “Claude Instant,” are now available for a limited “early access” group and Anthropic’s commercial partners. Those with access can use Claude through either a chat interface in Anthropic’s developer console or through an application programming interface (API). Using the API, the developers can connect to Anthropic’s servers remotely and add Claude’s analysis and text completion capabilities to their apps.
Anthropic claims that Claude is “less likely to produce harmful outputs, easier to interact with, and more controllable” than other AI chatbots while maintaining “high levels of reliability and predictability.” The company cites use cases such as searching, summarizing, collaborative writing, and coding. And, like ChatGPT APIClaude can change personality, tone, or behavior depending on usage preference.
A promotional video featuring Claude from Anthropic.
To sell Claude, Anthropic charges for usage per million characters of input and output. While OpenAI’s gpt-3.5-turbo AI model is $0.002 per 1,000 tokens (fragments of a word), Claude Instant is available for $0.42 per million characters as prompt input and $1.45 per million characters for output. “Claude-v1,” the larger model, comes in at $2.90 per million character input and $8.60 per million character output. While there is no standard conversion between tokens and characters, our back-of-the-envelope calculation is that OpenAI’s ChatGPT API is around $0.40 to $0.50 per million characters, so Claude is more expensive overall.
Ars Technica
According to Anthropic, Claude has already been integrated into several products available through partners, such as DuckAssist instant summaries from DuckDuckGo, a part of notion AIand an AI chat app called Poe created by Quora.
Former OpenAI VP of research Dario Amodei and his sister Daniela founded Anthropic in 2021 as “an AI safety and research company” after disagreement over the increasingly commercial direction of OpenAI. Amodi brought in other OpenAI staff such as Tom Brown, who led the engineering work on GPT-3. A revision of GPT-3 later served as the foundational language model among the ChatGPT. According to The VergeGoogle invested $300 million in Anthropic in late 2022 in exchange for 10 percent of the company.
Based on Google’s announced plans for Bard and the PaLM API, it seems unlikely that Google will rely on Anthropic for AI solutions in its products, but funding an OpenAI rival may be in Google’s strategic best interests going forward. For now, Anthropic plans to continue developing and improving Claude.
“We plan to introduce more updates in the coming weeks,” Anthropic wrote. “As we develop these systems, we will continue to work to make them more useful, honest, and harmless as we learn more from our safety research and our deployments.”