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Claude is pitched as a relatively ‘harmless’ AI chatbot developed by Anthropic, a start-up co-founded by former OpenAI employees.
Anthropic, an artificial intelligence company backed by Google parent Alphabet, is making its generative AI chatbot Claude available to businesses as an alternative to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Claude is pitched as a relatively “harmless” AI system that is capable of a wide variety of conversational and text processing tasks while maintaining “a high degree of reliability and predictability”.
Some of these tasks include summarisation, search, creative and collaborative writing, Q&A and coding.
Co-founded by former OpenAI employees in 2021 and based in San Francisco, Anthropic has been testing Claude in a closed alpha over the past few months with partners such as productivity tool Notion, Q&A website Quora and privacy-focused web browser DuckDuckGo.
“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,” the creators wrote in a blogpost yesterday (14 March).
Accessible to businesses through chat interface as well as API in Anthropic’s developer console, Anthropic claims that Claude can also take direction on personality, tone and behaviour.
Claude is also available in a lighter version called Claude Instant, which is faster than the main “high performance” model and less expensive.
“We plan to introduce even more updates in the coming weeks,” the creators wrote. Siblings Daniela and Dario Amodei, both former employees of OpenAI, are among the founders of Anthropic.
“As we develop these systems, we’ll continually work to make them more helpful, honest and harmless as we learn more from our safety research and our deployments.”
Last April, Anthropic raised $580m in Series B investment to build “large-scale experimental infrastructure” that would help the start-up explore and improve the safety properties of computationally intensive AI models such as Claude.
And just last month, Alphabet invested $300m in Anthropic for a 10pc stake in the start-up, according to a Financial Times report. As a result, Anthropic agreed to make Google Cloud its “preferred cloud provider” with the companies “co-develop[ing] AI computing systems.”
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