Built by the AI research company Anthropic, Claude is described as:
...a next-generation AI assistant based on Anthropic’s research into training helpful, honest, and harmless AI systems.
Unlike the more consumer-facing chatbots like ChatGPT and Bard, Claude is still available in limited access and only available to larger businesses. To date, it's been tested extensively by key partners like Notion, Quora, and DuckDuckGo.
Claude Capabilities
One of Anthropic's key selling points for Claude is their training process, which company states is based entirely on training helpful, honest, and harmless AI systems:
Early customers report that Claude is much less likely to produce harmful outputs, easier to converse with, and more steerable - so you can get your desired output with less effort. Claude can also take direction on personality, tone, and behavior.
Similar to competitors like ChatGPT and Bard, Claude can help with common AI tasks like summarization, search, creative writing, Q&A, coding, and more. Claude also provides the ability to guide its personality, tone and behaviour.
Claude Limitations
As Claude is still only available to certain partners limited access, the chatbot may have some limitations but these haven't been fully identified or disclosed yet.
Similar to ChatGPT, Claude also currently has a knowledge cutoff date of 2021.
How to use Claude
There are two versions of Claude currently available: Claude and Claude instant.
The standard Claude is their more high-performance and state-of-the-art of model while Claude Instant provides a less expensive and more lightweight version. Anthropic mentioned they plan to introduce more updates and enhancements to these models in the future. For users that are granted early access, Claude can be access through a chat interface or via API in the developer console.
If you haven't received early access, Claude Instant and Claude-Instant-100k can be accessed through Poe:
Claude's 100k context window
One of the biggest diffentiators of Claude is their 100k token context window, making it the largest context window on the market at the time of writing.
Released to select partners in May 2023, Claude extend extended its context window from 9K to 100K tokens, which is equivalent to about 75,000 words.
While the average person takes about 5+ hours to read 100,000 tokens, Claude accomplishes this in under a minute...
The model can read and accurately recall modified text from sizable literature, like "The Great Gatsby", in mere seconds. Additionally, Claude can extract relevant information from extensive documents, outperforming vector search-based methods, and act akin to a human assistant.
Access to 100K context windows is now available via Claude's API and also available in limited capacity on Poe (free trial required):
Claude Reviews
Given that Claude hasn't been as widely released it's difficult to compare Claude vs. ChatGPT and other competitors, although from second hand sources the chatbot has been recieved favorably in initial deployments. For example, many have praised Claude’s integration through Poe, noting the system's conversational nature, creativity in storytelling, and the comprehensibility of its responses.
Here are several other anectotal reviews of Claude:
Richard Robinson, CEO of Robin AI
"We use Claude to evaluate particular parts of a contract, and to suggest new, alternative language that's more friendly to our customers. We've been working with these types of technologies since 2019, and nothing has matched Claude's capabilities,”
Steve Fischer, Chief Business Officer at DuckDuckGo
We're thrilled to be working with Anthropic on DuckAssist, the first Instant Answer in our search results to use natural language technology to generate answers to search queries using Wikipedia and other related sources,”
Akshay Kothari, Co-Founder & COO of Notion
Anthropic and Notion share a common goal of helping individuals and enterprises leverage AI to increase productivity. Claude's uniquely creative writing and summarization abilities contribute to the development of our connected AI assistant, Notion AI. Notion users can now work more efficiently and improve their writing skills, all within the Notion workspace.
Claude Pricing
As of June 2023, Anthropic has released the following pricing:
Claude Instant
- $1.63/million tokens for prompts
- $5.51/millilon tokens fo completions
Claude-v1
- $11.02/million tokens for prompts
- $32.68/million tokens for completions
Summary: Claude Review
In summary, Claude, powered by Anthropic’s AI safety research, has entered the AI assistant space with promising capabilities. Its focus on providing helpful, honest, and "harmless" AI systems as its primary USP...although whether that's true remains to be seen.
With its range of use cases and the ability to tailor personality, tone, and behavior, Claude offers an adaptable AI assistant for many industries. Also, with it's 100k context window it's making quite a bit of noise in the chatbot space.
