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.
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
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:
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:
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:
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
What is Claude AI in simple terms?
Is Claude AI better than ChatGPT?
Is Claude AI safe?
Can Claude AI be detected?
Is Claude AI based on GPT?
Is Claude free to use?
References
- Amazon and Anthropic deepen their shared commitment to advancing generative AI (Aboutamazon)
- Google Invests In Anthropic For $2 Billion As AI Race Heats Up (Forbes)
- Welcome, Anthropic! (Salesforceventures)
- Claude \ Anthropic (Anthropic)
- Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedback \ Anthropic (Anthropic)
- Introducing the next generation of Claude\Anthropic (Anthropic)
- Claude API\Anthropic (Anthropic)