Meet Claude: waitlist for Anthropic's chatbot now available
Anthropic has released Claude, an AI-powered chatbot, that is already used in some applications, including DuckDuckGo's DuckAssist service.
Claude, which Anthropic describes as a "next generation AI assistant for your tasks, no matter the scale", is the company's first public product. Anthropic has been founded by former employees of OpenAI, which have created GPT and ChatGPT.
Access to Claude is locked behind a waitlist currently. Anthropic appears to target business and Enterprise customers exclusively at this point, judging from the information that it requests from interested users. Microsoft used a waitlist for Bing Chat as well when it launched the product, but appears to have lifted the waitlist limitation in the past 24 hours.
Anthropic notes that Claude is "helpful and trustworthy", and that companies can trust Claude to represent it, thanks to its "constitutional AI and harmlessness training".
Anthropic highlights some of the tasks that Claude excels at on the official website. The company notes that Claude can be used for coaching, customer service, sales or back-office tasks. Claude can "edit, rewrite, summarize and classify tests, extract structured data, do Q&As based on content, and more, notes Anthropic on its website.
The assistant can have natural conversations with chat participants, similarly to ChatGPT. Claude supports different tones, which users may adjust when interacting with the AI. Anthropic notes that Claude's tone, personality and behavior can be customized based on what is required of it. Claude is designed to be helpful and innocent, and the makers promise that Claude won't have breakdowns like Bing Chat, which gave inappropriate responses in some chat sessions in its early stages.
One of the differences to ChatGPT is that Claude does not have access to the Internet, at least not in its initial version.
Claude is available as an API, which DuckDuckgo uses already to power DuckAssist. DuckAssist is not designed as a chatbot, but as a helper tool for DuckDuckGo's search engine. Like Brave's AI Summarizer, DuckAssist is designed to provide answers to user queries immediately on the search results page. DuckAssist relies on Wikipedia data, which explains why it can't provide answers to all user queries.
Anthropic's Claude may be integrated into nearly any company product. Anthropic has published model pricing information. Two model families are available: Claude Instant, which is optimized for low latency, high throughput use cases, and Claude-v1, which is optimized for superior performance on tasks that require complex reasoning.
Claude Instant is available for $0.45 per million characters (prompt) and $1.45 per million characters (output). Claude-v1 is more expensive at $2.90 per million characters (prompt) and $8.60 per million characters (output).
Google parent Alphabet has invested $300 million USD into Anthropic and holds 10% of the company's shares. Both companies cooperate to develop AI services.
Interested users find a FAQ on the Anthropic website with additional information about Claude.
