$4.1B OpenAI Rival Anthropic Debuts New AI Chatbot and Opens It to the Public

There is a new entrant in the nascent AI arms race.

AS MicrosoftOpenAI and Google In the rush to develop the most advanced chatbots powered by generative AI, Anthropic is investing heavily to keep up. Just months after raising $750 million in two funding rounds, the startup is launching a new AI-powered chatbot: Claude 2.

Founded in 2021 by former OpenAI research executives and funded by companies including Google, Salesforce AND Zoom inAnthropic is opening up its chatbot technology to consumers for the first time with the Claude 2. Over the past couple of months, the company’s AI models have been tested by companies like Slack, Notion, and Quora, and Anthropic has amassed a list of more than 350,000 people are expected to request access to Claude’s application programming interface and its consumer offerings.

“We focused on the businesses, on making Claude as safe as possible,” said Daniela Amodei, who co-founded Anthropic with her brother Dario. “We really feel this is the safest version of Claude we’ve developed to date, so we’ve been very excited to get it into the hands of a wider range of both companies and individual consumers.”

Claude 2 will initially be available only to users in the US and UK, and Anthropic plans to expand availability in the coming months.

Since OpenAI introduced ChatGPT to the public late last year, the tech world has invested heavily in the potential of generative AI chatbots, which respond to text requests with sophisticated, conversational responses. Academics and ethicists have expressed significant concerns about the technology’s tendency to propagate bias, but even so, it has quickly made its way into schools, online travel, the medical industry, online advertising, and more.

In March, OpenAI released GPT-4, its biggest update to the technology behind ChatGPT. Two months later, he allowed ChatGPT to start browsing the internet so that responses were no longer limited by the 2021 training data cutoff date, but then disabled the chatbot’s internet browsing ability after reports of usage problems like bypassing paywalls.

Google announced its competitor Bard in February and has since updated the chatbot’s math and coding capabilities and incorporated the AI ​​service into more products.

Anthropic’s ambitions are no less grand.

The company says Claude 2 has the ability to summarize up to around 75,000 words, which could be the length of a book. Users can enter large datasets and request summaries in the form of a memo, letter or story. ChatGPT, by contrast, can handle around 3,000 words.

Daniela Amodei said Anthropic invested at least two months in developing Claude 2, with a team of 30-35 people working directly on the AI ​​model and a total of 150 people supporting it. You mentioned that the market is growing so rapidly that there is a lot of room for more players to succeed.

“It’s a very unusual time from a business perspective because there is so much demand for large language models and far more demand than the industry can currently provide,” Amodei said. “The landscape is very broad and there’s really a lot of room for many different users and types of users to use these systems.”

In May, Anthropic was one of four companies invited to a White House meeting to discuss responsible AI development with Vice President Kamala Harris. Google’s parent Alphabet, Microsoft and OpenAI were the others.

That same month, the company raised $450 million, following a $300 million funding round in March at a $4.1 billion valuation.

Amodei provided some tangible examples of Claude 2’s improvements over the previous version of the model. The new chatbot scored 76.5% on the multiple-choice section of the bar exam, up from 73%. And in a Python coding test, Claude 2 scored 71%, compared to 56% for the previous iteration.

When it comes to security, the updated chatbot was twice as good at providing “harmless answers,” according to a blog post, though it’s worth noting that the Red Team’s security assessment was conducted internally.

Despite Claude 2’s performance improvements, Amodei acknowledged that there are many hurdles ahead of Anthropic and the industry as a whole. For example, the tendency of AI chatbots to come up with incorrect answers, called “hallucinations” by some tech companies, is a persistent problem.

“There are so many unknown unknowns remaining but also known challenges with all the language patterns in today’s world,” Amodei said. “No language model is 100% immune to hallucinations, and Claude 2 is the same.”

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