Anthropic, a startup co-founded by ex-OpenAI employees, today launched something of a rival to the viral sensation ChatGPT.
Called Claude, Anthropic’s AI — a chatbot — can be instructed to perform a range of tasks, including searching across documents, summarizing, writing and coding, and answering questions about particular topics. In these ways, it’s similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. But Anthropic makes the case that Claude is “much less likely to produce harmful outputs,” “easier to converse with” and “more steerable.”
Organizations can request access. Pricing has yet to be detailed.
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Following a closed beta late last year, Anthropic has been quietly testing Claude with launch partners, including Robin AI, AssemblyAI, Notion, Quora and DuckDuckGo. Two versions are available as of this morning via an API, Claude and a faster, less costly derivative called Claude Instant.
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closed beta. Claude is reportedly worse at math and a poorer programmer than ChatGPT. And it hallucinates, inventing a name for a chemical that doesn’t exist, for example, and providing dubious instructions for producing weapons-grade uranium.
It’s also possible to get around Claude’s built-in safety features via clever prompting, as is the case with ChatGPT. One user in the beta was able to get Claude to describe how to make meth at home.
“The challenge is making models that both never hallucinate but are still useful — you can get into a tough situation where the model figures a good way to never lie is to never say anything at all, so there’s a tradeoff there that we’re working on,” the Anthropic spokesperson said. “We’ve also made progress on reducing hallucinations, but there is more to do.”
Anthropic’s other plans include letting developers customize Claude’s constitutional principles to their own needs. Customer acquisition is another focus, unsurprisingly — Anthropic sees its core users as “startups making bold technological bets” in addition to “larger, more established enterprises.”
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The company has substantial outside backing, including a $580 million tranche from a group of investors including disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, Caroline Ellison, Jim McClave, Nishad Singh, Jaan Tallinn and the Center for Emerging Risk Research.
Most recently, Google pledged $300 million in Anthropic for a 10% stake in the startup. Under the terms of the deal, which was first reported by the Financial Times, Anthropic agreed to make Google Cloud its “preferred cloud provider” with the companies “co-develop[ing] AI computing systems.”
Source: Anthropic launches Claude, a chatbot to rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT | TechCrunch
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