Alphabet Inc-backed Ahtropic, an artificial intelligence (AI) firm has on Tuesday launched Claude, a chatbot to rival Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

According to Ahtropic, Claude is a next-generation AI assistant based on Anthropic’s research into training helpful, honest, and harmless AI systems. Accessible through chat interface and API in its developer console, Claude is capable of a wide variety of conversational and text processing tasks while maintaining a high degree of reliability and predictability, the company said in an announcement on its website.

“Claude can help with use cases including summarization, search, creative and collaborative writing, Q&A, coding, and more. Early customers report that Claude is much less likely to produce harmful outputs, easier to converse with, and more steerable – so you can get your desired output with less effort. Claude can also take direction on personality, tone, and behavior,” the company added.

Athropic said after working for the past few months with key partners like Notion, Quora, and DuckDuckGo in a closed alpha, the company has been able to carefully test out its systems “in the wild, and are ready to offer Claude more broadly so it can power crucial, cutting-edge use cases at scale”.

“We’re offering two versions of Claude today: Claude and Claude Instant. Claude is a state-of-the-art high-performance model, while Claude Instant is a lighter, less expensive, and much faster option. We plan to introduce even more updates in the coming weeks. As we develop these systems, we’ll continually work to make them more helpful, honest, and harmless as we learn more from our safety research and our deployments,” Athropic added.

The Information reported last week that Spark Capital is leading a $300 million investment in Anthropic at a pre-investment valuation of $4.1 billion, quoting two people familiar with the matter.

Earlier in February, Financial Times reported that Google has invested about $300 million in Anthropic. The deal involves Google taking a stake of about 10 percent in the start-up and boosts Anthropic’s finances.

Anthropic announced then it has selected Google Cloud as its preferred cloud provider. The partnership is designed so that the companies can co-develop AI computing systems; Anthropic will leverage Google Cloud’s cutting-edge GPU and TPU clusters to train, scale, and deploy its AI systems.

“We’re partnering with Google Cloud to support the next phase of Anthropic, where we’re going to deploy our AI systems to a larger set of people,” said Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei then. “This partnership gives us the cloud infrastructure performance and scale we need.”

In the announcement on Tuesday, Athropic also shared how its partners are using Claude and their testimonials.

One of its key partners, Quora, has offered Claude to users through Poe, their AI Chat app. “Users describe Claude’s answers as detailed and easily understood, and they like that exchanges feel like natural conversation,” says Autumn Besselman, Head of People and Comms from Quora.

“Claude feels more conversational than ChatGPT,” said a happy Poe user, while another says, “I find Claude to be more interactive and creative in its storytelling.”

“I personally love the way the answers are presented and how in-depth, yet simply presented they are,” says one user who was “impressed by Claude’s combination of language skills and expertise”, the company wrote.

The company said Juni Learning, a provider of online education solutions, uses Anthropic to power their Discord Juni Tutor Bot, an online tutoring solution to help students achieve academic success.

Claude is also boosting the productivity of people at work and school via its integration with Notion.

“We’re working with partners to integrate Claude with sources of solid, real-time information, like those found in search engines such as DuckDuckGo,” the company said.

Robin AI, a legal infrastructure business, is using Claude to re-think the future of contracts.

“We use Claude to evaluate particular parts of a contract, and to suggest new, alternative language that’s more friendly to our customers. We’ve been working with these types of technologies since 2019, and nothing has matched Claude’s capabilities,” says Richard Robinson, CEO of Robin AI. “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.”

AssemblyAI, an innovative AI company that is also partnering with Anthropic to help power its platform of APIs that transcribe and understand audio data at scale, the company added.

Featured photo credit: Anthropic

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