The popularity and success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT has catapulted the world’s major companies into stiff competition for the development and production of intelligent chat assistants and conversational AIs. Alongside popular names such as Google’s Bard that have shot to recent prominence, a Google-backed company named Anthropic has recently launched its own iteration of an AI chatbot called Claude. Much like its other rivals, Claude comes endowed with conversational and text-interpretation capabilities. It is interesting to note that the founders of Anthropic were formerly vice presidents of policy, safety, and research at OpenAI. The firm has based its novel conversational AI around the tenets of safety and harmlessness, rooted in the belief that artificial intelligence must stick to honesty and utility. Anthropic has claimed that its chatbot is much less likely to respond with harmful and potentially dangerous responses to user prompts.
Much like how OpenAI has the backing of Microsoft and has partnered with the latter’s search engine Bing, Anthropic is supported by Google, with the company being heavily invested in by the tech giant. Apart from the generative and other capabilities of Claude, users are also able to set the tone and personality of the chatbot, allowing them a great degree of control over the AI. This not only allows users more operational freedom but also helps them to use conversational artificial intelligence in ways that they’re comfortable with. Witnessing widespread success, Anthropic has also expressed intent to launch paid subscription plans to its chatbot, in-line with extant competitors and their practices. The forthcoming sections explore the various aspects of Claude, how it compares to other conversational AIs, and the scope it presents for education and other industries in the increasingly AI-influenced future that the world anticipates.
Unraveling Claude AI’s Functionalities
Anthropic bases its AI’s capabilities on conversational dynamics to promote an enriched user experience.
The launch of Claude witnessed the release of two language models. The core and more expansive model released by Anthropic is the Claude-v1 model, whereas a more lightweight version is named Claude Instant. The latter, being faster, is based on a truncated form of the original language model that Claude is based on; however, given that the expansive version retains access to a greater database, it remains more powerful when compared to its lightweight counterpart. The primary purpose around the modeling and development of Claude has been focused to maintain fidelity and prevent AI hallucinations, biased responses, and harmful information. Claude emphasizes the necessity for safety in the development and proliferation of generative artificial intelligence. With a primary focus on conversational dynamics, Claude AI encourages healthy discussion between artificial intelligence and human users to promote a better understanding of various concepts, while also utilizing user feedback to help train the AI with tangible data and user metrics.
Currently available to a select few users that are subscribed to Claude’s plans, alongside users already on a waitlist, the AI also allows access to partner clients. Apart from Quora’s Poe chatbot, Claude is also used by the search engine firm DuckDuckGo as its chat assistant. Unlike Google Bard, Claude is capable of coding, despite its primary focus remaining on conversational dynamics to better engage its users. Currently, the parent company Anthropic plans on integrating more improvements into the chatbot with the growing rate of interactions on both its main interface, alongside those happening on partner platforms. Given that the application was initially tested in a closed beta setting, the company plans on opening up the interface to an open beta upon developing the application further and fixing a few core issues noted by clients and the initial beta testers. With an expansion of testing and a larger number of interactions, Claude’s capabilities are set to grow and branch out into numerous other functionalities.
How Does Claude Compare to Other Conversational AIs?
Claude is capable of both text interpretation as well as coding to help its users.
While capable of both coding and engaging in conversation that maintains a fair degree of fidelity, Claude still makes mistakes and tends to hallucinate facts. Given that the language model is still a work in progress, its developers are working to weed out the errors that might cause problems for its users and compromise the overall safety of the application. When compared to ChatGPT, Claude is reportedly less efficient in terms of both coding and carrying out mathematical operations. Like its other counterparts, Claude can also be coaxed into providing responses that might potentially be antithetical to its safety measures. Despite its drawbacks, Claude relies on a straightforward interface that maximizes ease of use for potential users that intend on engaging the chatbot in conversation. It also offers a great degree of customizability, allowing the AI to adapt and respond in a manner dictated by the user, enhancing the personalized nature of generative artificial intelligence. One area where Claude remains ahead of its competitors is its resilience to jailbreaks and tampering attempts. Claude remains a secure chatbot capable of fending off most attacks and misleading prompts other major chatbots might succumb to.
Differences between Claude and its competitors also lie in the fact that it was developed through a constitution of 10 principles that were set up by Anthropic to guide the development of the AI chatbot. These principles were fed into another artificial intelligence model that generated thousands of prompts, which were eventually filtered by developers. The most relevant and apt responses were then distilled to create a practical model, which was then implemented to guide Claude’s development. To further enhance its utility, Claude, like the latest GPT-4 iteration from OpenAI, also allows its partners to implement the model in their systems using a seamless API that ensures easy integration.
The Outlook for Anthropic’s Claude AI
The focus on safety and ethics might just make AI more acceptable to concerned academicians and policymakers.
While Claude might not be as popular as its more extensive and popular competitors, it reinforces the intent behind the development of safe and secure artificial intelligence. By partnering with popular firms, Claude AI has shown promise while also hinting at the increasing acceptance of artificial intelligence technologies among the major brands and companies in the technical sphere. This indicates that cyberspace will soon turn into an expanse that is dotted with a variety of conversational AIs and chat assistants. The integration of these tools will invariably also extend to handheld devices such as mobile phones and tablets. That being said, student exposure and the overall influence of artificial intelligence on education is on an upward trajectory; however, if AI development and proliferation bases its prime focus on tenets such as safety and harmlessness, the educational community and academia might just become more amenable to generative artificial intelligence. Claude has garnered considerable success since its launch, warranting the firm to follow up its progress with a successor model—Claude 2. Claude Instant, too, has been upgraded to a successor model named Claude Instant 1.2. Successive developments have allowed Anthropic to have improved upon existing parameters, ensuring even lower chances of hallucination and flawed responses alongside enhanced overall capabilities.
FAQs
1. Is Anthropic’s Claude better than ChatGPT?
Claude boasts better safety and security features when compared to ChatGPT. While computational capabilities of OpenAI’s chatbot might be better, Claude is capable of supporting longer context lengths per prompt and data extraction capabilities. Claude 2 has even better capabilities and comes close even to OpenAI’s successor flagship model GPT-4.
2. Where can one access Claude?
Currently, Claude can only be accessed in the United States and the United Kingdom. However, the language model can be accessed by users living in other countries through verified VPN services.
3. Is Claude open source?
No, Anthropic’s Claude is not open source and is worked on by a closed group of dedicated developers. All the developments and advancements to the model are made purely by Anthropic’s research team.