The peak of the AI chatbot boom may be over, but there are now a variety of competitive generative AI chatbots.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT was the first to captivate the world with its impressive human-like chatbot that could both tell jokes and explain detailed and complicated scientific research. All from simple text prompts written by humans. It was a revelation and sparked an intense AI arms race as the world’s largest companies tried to grab a piece of the pie and at the same time new companies emerged with their own AI products.
Google and Microsoft are just two examples of large technology companies that have entered the AI space in recent years.
One of ChatGPT’s big competitors in the generative chatbot industry is Claude AI, which launched in 2023.
Who owns Claude AI?
Claude AI is owned by California-based AI startup Anthropoic and was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI senior members Daniella and Dario Amodei. Dario was previously Vice President of Research at OpenAI. They were among several OpenAI employees who left the company in 2019 to lead business units, including the company’s work with Microsoft.
Within a few years, the company had raised $700 million in funding and towards the end of 2023, Amazon was announced as a minority shareholder after investing up to $4 billion. Since then, Google has also invested $400 million in Anthropic.
The company, which now employs more than 150 people, has created a family of large language models (LLM) called Claude.
Anthropic’s unique selling point is what they call “Constitutional AI.” This is an approach designed to educate LLMs as ethically as possible. The chatbot is trained on principles such as the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, allowing it to behave in a safe, accurate and protected manner.
Anthropic launched the first version of Claude in March 2023 and followed up with Claude 2 in July 2023. Claude 2 stood out in the market with the ability to upload PDFs and other documents for aggregation and analysis purposes.
In March 2024, Anthropic launched Claude 3, which the company said set new industry benchmarks for a wide range of cognitive tasks. Claude 3 is a family – Haiku, Sonnet and Opus – of models with varying skills, knowledge levels and sophistication.
Now valued at around $20 billion, Anthropic is a non-profit company that aims to make profits but benefit the public and its users.
What is Claude AI?
In its simplest form, Claude AI is Anthropic’s very own version of ChatGPT. Similar to ChatGPT 3.5, its data set has a limit – 2022 – and cannot be connected to the Internet, so the accuracy in responding to prompts related to events after 2022 is limited.
The chatbot is trained to have natural, human-like text-based conversations and is best suited for summaries, Q&A, decision making, code writing, and summaries.
Claude is also the name of the underlying LLM that underlies the Claude models. In addition to Claude, there is also Claude Instant, a lighter and faster version of Claude, and Claude 3, the newest member of the family.
Several features set Claude apart from his competitors. He is characterized by his fluent conversational skills, can keep up with exciting conversations and is proud of his factual accuracy and transparency.
It is also very fast. For example, I uploaded a copy of my resume and asked Claude to summarize it for me. It took me less than a few seconds to receive seven bullet points on my resume, including a career timeline and an overall summary of my expertise and experience.
Claude currently has a context window of 200,000 tokens, meaning it can handle text input of around 150,000 words or 500 pages of written material. This reduces the likelihood of users experiencing hallucinations – that is, when a chatbot responds with something that is factually incorrect – and allows companies to use the chatbot to quickly and accurately analyze and summarize large documents.
How to use Claude AI: step by step
Log in
Using Claude AI is easy. Simply go to claude.ai and sign up with an email address. You will then be asked to provide your name and acknowledge Anthropic’s Acceptable Use Policy and the fact that Claude is not perfect and may generate false or misleading information. Standard material.
Once the formalities are completed, you will be redirected to Claude’s landing page. The model you automatically get access to is Claude 3 Sonnet, which is Anthropic’s second highest Claude model.
Enter prompts
Sonnet can understand and work with images as well as text and documents. So you can upload an image for Claude to extract text from, convert the UI design into front-end code, and ask Claude to recommend style improvements to a photo of a specific environment, or create a recipe from a photo of a plate of food – perfect for interior designers, programmers and aspiring chefs, for example.
To interact with Claude 3 Sonnet, all you need to do is either type a prompt in the text field or upload a file and give it some instructions on what you want the model to do with it. Claude can read PDFs, Word documents and more.
Be clear and specific
To achieve the best results when using Claude AI, it is recommended to ask clear and specific questions. The more detailed your query is, the better answers you are likely to receive. Additionally, always try to provide context whenever possible so that Claude can understand relevant details.
And it’s also good to follow up on your initial questions for further clarification. Claude will always try to explain topics in more detail when asked. You can also ask Claude if any further information is required or if you have any questions before your request is processed.
Practice
Beyond that, it’s worth just trying out Claude and seeing what its limitations are and how it can be useful for your own purposes. Try uploading documents and having general conversations with them to get a feel for their capabilities. In this way, you will learn how to best use Claude AI for your everyday tasks, be it for professional or personal use.
Is Claude AI free to use?
Claude AI is free with limitations, currently around 30 messages per day. All you need is an email address to get access to the free version.
The upgrade to access Anthropic’s faster and smarter Claude AI models costs $20 per month, billed annually.
Claude Pro gives you much more functionality, including a fully customizable persona and Claude integration with third-party apps like Slack, 5x more messaging than the free plan, and early access to new features.
Featured Image: Anthropocene