Claude AI

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What is Claude AI?

The basic definition of Claude AI is a family of foundational AI models developed by an AI startup known as Anthropic. Its latest family of multimodal models, Claude 3, can be accessed directly via the Claude chatbot.

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Claude 3’s models use techniques like natural language processing (NLP) and natural language generation (NLG) to process user input and generate contextually relevant responses.

Techopedia Explains the Claude AI Meaning

Techopedia Explains the Claude AI Meaning

The meaning of Claude AI is a generative AI chatbot and family of multimodal AI models built by Anthropic. But what is Claude AI used for exactly? Shortly, Claude can answer user questions, generate text content, translate natural language, produce code, analyze images, and process documents.

At the time of writing, there are three main models in the Claude 3 family of models:

Haiku
A lightweight model that’s designed to complete simple tasks at high speeds. 

Sonnet
A model that combines performance and speed for high-throughput tasks.

Opus
Anthropic’s most advanced model which can handle complex analysis, multi-step tasks, high-order math, and coding. 

Claude AI History

Anthropic, the company that owns Claude AI, was initially founded in 2021 by a group of ex OpenAI employees, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who helped develop GPT-2 and GPT-3, and Daniela Amodei, President at Anthropic who helped manage OpenAI’s natural language processing and music generation teams.

As of today, the company has a range of notable investors including Amazon ($4 billion), Google ($2 billion), and Salesforce (undisclosed).

How Claude AI Works

Users can interact with Claude by entering text prompts into a text box or by uploading an image or document to analyze. Simply ask the chatbot questions in natural language, press enter, and Claude will generate a response.

Claude AI uses natural language patterns it learned from its training data to understand the user’s prompt intent and predict a relevant response. This approach means that sometimes the virtual assistant will hallucinate incorrect information in response to user questions.

How Do I Get Access to Claude AI?

You can access Claude AI directly through the company website or via an application programming interface (API). If you want to access Claude through the company website, you will need to sign up with your email address and phone number. You’ll also need to acknowledge Anthropic’s acceptable use policy.

Claude AI Capabilities

Claude AI and the Claude 3 family of models provide users with a number of core capabilities.

Some of these are as follows:

Question answering
Claude can respond to user questions with a relevant response.

Task automation
Plan and automate complex actions across APIs and databases.

Generate code
Produce code to help build high-performance applications.
Analyze photo and image inputs
Describe images, label objects, and process text with optical character recognition (OCR).
200,000 context length
Supports the input of up to 200,000 tokens.
Process documents at high speed
Haiku can read research papers around 10,000 tokens in less than three seconds.
Limit harmful output
Guardrails limit harmful output while minimizing the impact on harmless prompts.
Available via claude.ai and the Claude API
Access through Anthropic’s website or via an API.

How to Use Claude AI

You can use Claude by entering text prompts or uploading a document or image (supports a maximum of 5 images up to 10 MB each). To begin, enter your question in natural language, and press enter. The chatbot will then generate its response.

At the bottom of Claude’s response, there are some buttons you can click, including Copy to make a copy of the response, Retry to prompt the chatbot to generate a new response, and thumbs up/thumbs down icons to rate whether the response fulfilled your request.

How Much Does Claude AI Cost?

Anthropic offers Claude AI as part of a range of different packages, which vary in price according to the number of users and the performance of the connected LLM.

A brief summary of Anthropic’s pricing options can be found below:

Price: $30 per person per month for a minimum of 5 members

Features:

Everything in the Pro plan plus:

  • Higher usage limits
  • Central billing and administration
  • Early access to collaboration features

Claude AI vs. ChatGPT

Claude AI is one of ChatGPT’s main competitors, with Claude 3 outperforming both   GPT-4 and GPT 3.5 on key reasoning, mathematics, and code benchmarks, including MMLU, GPQA, GSM8K, MATH, HumanEval, and HellaSwag. A list of performance scores for each can be viewed below.

Benchmark  Claude 3 Opus  Claude 3 Sonnet  Claude 3 Haiku  GPT-4  GPT 3.5 
MMLU  86.8% 79.0% 75.2% 86.4% 70.0%
GPQA (graduate level reasoning)  50.4% 40.4% 33.3% 35.7% 28.1%
GSM8K (grade school math)  95.0% 92.3% 88.9% 92.0% 57.1%
MATH (math problem solving)  60.1% 43.1% 38.9% 52.9% 34.1%
HumanEval (code)  84.9% 73.0% 75.9% 67.0% 48.1%
HellaSwag (Common knowledge)  95.4% 89.0% 85.9% 95.3% 85.5%

Claude 3 also offers a larger context length than ChatGPT – offering support for 200,000 tokens compared to GPT-4 Turbo’s 128,000. That being said, ChatGPT has the advantage of generating images via its DALL-E 3 integration, which Claude 3 cannot in its current form.

Both solutions are also extremely competitive in terms of pricing, with GPT-4 offering a lower price for outputs and Claude 3 Opus offering a lower price for inputs. A brief summary can be viewed below:

Model  Input price  Output price 
Claude 3 Opus  $15 per million tokens $75 per million tokens
GPT-4  $30 per million tokens $60 per million tokens

Claude AI Safety

One of Claude’s core selling points has been Anthropic’s focus on creating a “harmless” AI assistant. It does this through various means, including constitutional AI, where it uses supervised learning and reinforcement learning to automatically critique and revise responses to offer more desirable and safe responses.

Anthropic also has dedicated teams to mitigate risks such as misinformation, CSAM, biological misuse, election interference, and autonomous replication skills. It also uses red teaming evaluations to evaluate risks in real-world scenarios.

Claude AI Pros and Cons

But what is Claude AI good for you might ask? In short, Claude 3 offers a number of pros and cons:

Pros

  • High-level reasoning
  • Large context window
  • Process image inputs
  • Create code

Cons

  • Can’t generate images
  • User experience
  • Not connected to the web

    Claude AI Alternatives

    There are a number of different alternatives to Claude 3 on the market. Some of the most popular solutions are listed below:

    ChatGPT
    OpenAI’s chatbot connects to GPT 3.5 and GPT-4, and can respond to user questions via voice and text, generate images, and more.

    Gemini
    Google’s research assistant Gemini can respond to text, image, and voice inputs. It’s also connected to the Internet.

    Perplexity AI
    An AI chatbot connected to the Internet, that answers users’ questions and provides citations for where its response information was collected from. 

    The Bottom Line

    Claude AI is inarguably one of the top LLMs on the market and stands neck-and-neck with tools like ChatGPT and Gemini. If you want to experiment with generative AI as part of your workflow, you can’t go wrong with trying out Claude 3.

    FAQs

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    Tim Keary
    Technology Specialist
    Tim Keary
    Technology Specialist

    Tim Keary is a freelance technology writer and reporter covering AI, cybersecurity, and enterprise technology. Before joining Techopedia full-time in 2023, his work appeared on VentureBeat, Forbes Advisor, and other notable technology platforms, where he covered the latest trends and innovations in technology.