Anthropic, a startup co-founded by ex-OpenAI employees, on Tuesday launched Claude AI.
The founders said Claude AI can perform a range of tasks like browsing documents, summarizing, writing and coding, and providing answers to questions.
The founders said the product is set to rival ChatGPT.
“We think that Claude is the right tool for a wide variety of customers and use cases,” an Anthropic spokesperson told TechCrunch
“We’ve been investing in our infrastructure for serving models for several months and are confident we can meet customer demand.”
Anthropic has been quietly testing Claude with partners; Robin AI, AssemblyAI, Notion, Quora and DuckDuckGo in Beta last year.
Claude powers DuckDuckGo’s recently launched DuckAssist. The AI also powers Quora, and Notion.
“We use Claude to evaluate particular parts of a contract, and to suggest new, alternative language that’s more friendly to our customers,” Robin CEO Richard Robinson said
“We’ve found Claude is really good at understanding language — including in technical domains like legal language. It’s also very confident at drafting, summarising, translations and explaining complex concepts in simple terms.”
Anthropic says that Claude doesn’t have access to the internet and was trained on public webpages and “trained to avoid sexist, racist and toxic outputs” and to “to avoid helping a human engage in illegal or unethical activities.”
Anthropic calls this, “constitutional AI,”
“Constitutional AI” seeks to provide “principle-based” approach to aligning AI systems with human intentions, letting AI similar to ChatGPT respond to questions using a simple set of principles as a guide. To build Claude, Anthropic started with a list of around 10 principles that, taken together, formed a sort of “constitution” (hence the name “constitutional AI”). The principles haven’t been made public.
Anthropic admits that Claude has its limitations. The product is reportedly worse at math and a poorer programmer than ChatGPT.
However, the company has great backing from including $580 from a group of investors, disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, the Center for Emerging Risk Research and others.
Google also pledged $300 million in Anthropic for a 10% stake in the startup.
