The Five Biggest Key Takeaways from This Article
- Anthropic, an AI safety research company, was founded by former OpenAI employees.
- Anthropic’s flagship A.I. platform is the chatbot Claude.
- The latest version of Claude is Claude 3, which is supposedly stronger in mathematical thinking and general knowledge than any other publicly available chatbot.
- Claude 3 comes in two forms: Claude 3 Sonnet and Claude 3 Opus. The former is free while the latter, a much more sophisticated version, is available for $20 a month. Claude 3 Haiku will also be available for instantaneous results.
- Business owners may want to consider Claude given the potential issues and setbacks that OpenAI may be facing this year.
High-Profile A.I. Company Anthropic Debuts Its Strongest Chatbot Yet: Claude
Anthropic is one of the big names in A.I., although you do not see it in the headlines as much as companies like OpenAI or, yes, Google.
However, it is really one of the most significant players in the A.I. sphere right now because of its involvement with other major players like Google and Amazon (more on that below).
And recently Anthropic announced the latest version of Claude, its chatbot that you may have never even heard of before seeing this article’s headline.
But Claude, like competitor chatbots Gemini and ChatGPT, is a generative A.I. platform of large import.
It has gone through multiple versions, and the latest as of this writing is Claude 3, which Anthropic claims is the strongest model available, especially when it comes to solving mathematical problems and offering general knowledge.
Claude 3, Explained
So, this latest version of Anthropic’s flagship Large Language Model (LLM) offers the usual perks, such as writing on demand.
It can also analyze images as well, which includes charts and graphs.
Anthropic also designed Claude to be fluent in multiple languages, with Japanese being one example.
The strongest version, Claude 3 Opus, is available at $20 per month.
On the other hand, Claude 3 Sonnet is a free but weaker version, but is likely suitable for most business’s content generation and revision needs.
Claude 3 Haiku is, as of this writing, in the “coming soon” phase, and is apparently designed specifically for producing instantaneous results. This approach will probably work well for less complex tasks that require completion on a short deadline.
But should business owners believe Anthropic’s claims, since every chatbot released by a major company is claimed by said company to be the strongest model available to the public?
It happened with ChatGPT’s GPT-4, and Gemini (the upgrade from Google Bard), and now it is happening with Anthropic’s Claude.
But when you realize how much money is going into this particular chatbot, then there is indeed evidence to suggest that, at the very least, Claude 3 Opus is likely quite competitive with other available chatbots.
How Is Anthropic Funding All This Stuff?
Something you need to understand about Large Language Models (LLMs) such as Claude is that they are enormously expensive to run.
Since money, sadly, does not grow on trees, most A.I. startups of significant ambition are reliant on securing cash for operations from large corporations such as Amazon and Google.
That is exactly what Anthropic did. This A.I. company managed to get $4 billion from Amazon and an additional $2 billion commitment from Google.
If you are wondering whether there is a little lower layer to look into here, your intuition is correct. Of course, these investments are strategic and have the scent of quid-pro-quo business dealings all over them.
In business, this situation is typical. However, when a company positions itself as a for-benefit entity, it’s natural to question how much they’ll adhere to the instructions of their for-profit majority investors.
For one, Amazon and Google offer cloud computing services that can power the A.I. platforms that Anthropic develops.
Another publicly discernible perk to these dealings is that these companies get to integrate these powerful A.I. platforms into their own suite of services and operations for for-profit purposes.
For instance, Amazon Bedrock now allows for users of that platform, which is linked to Amazon Web Services (AWS), to generate generative A.I. platforms fit for the users’ specific purposes.
The Upshot for Business Owners
A Claude subscription may be worth the investment for business owners down the line.
This is because one of the major competitors, OpenAI (developer of ChatGPT), is facing quite a bit of uphill battles that will likely prove quite expensive, potentially slowing the progress of its A.I. developments.
These issues include copyright lawsuits as well as lawsuits from Elon Musk.
If these end up costing OpenAI a lot of time and money, then it may be the case that Claude would be the safer option for an easy-to-access chatbot for the time being.
