Google Introduces a ChatGBT Killer

Claude, a new AI language model, was announced in March 2023 as a direct competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. It was built by Anthropic, an AI safety startup in which Alphabet, Google’s parent company, had recently invested; Google’s own chatbot at the time was Bard.

Like ChatGPT, Claude is designed to understand and generate human-like language, and Anthropic is pitching it to businesses for tasks from customer service to document work. It says Claude differs from ChatGPT in some important ways.

The main difference Anthropic stresses is how Claude was trained. It uses an approach the company calls Constitutional AI, in which the model is guided by a written set of principles meant to make it more helpful and less likely to produce harmful answers. If that works as promised, it could matter a lot in fields like customer service, where a chatbot’s tone and reliability affect how customers feel about a company.

Anthropic has also put safety and responsible use at the center of its pitch. That contrasts with the concerns some have raised about ChatGPT producing biased or harmful language, which OpenAI has worked to address.

Claude still has catching up to do. ChatGPT has been in development for several years, was trained on a massive dataset and has posted impressive results on many language tasks. It remains to be seen how Claude compares, and whether it can win the same attention and adoption as ChatGPT.

Claude is another notable step forward for AI language models, and Google’s backing gives it serious resources. The competition between Claude, Bard and ChatGPT should push all of them to improve quickly. Businesses and consumers stand to benefit.

Frank Jones, CISSP

Frank Jones has loved computers from the age of 13. Frank got his hacking career started when he downloaded a war dialing program that he used to detect dial up modems in his hometown of Chicago. Frank Jones now works as a JAVA coder and cyber security researcher.