OpenAI and its flagship ChatGPT have some new competition. Anthropic, another San Francisco-based startup, released it’s Claude 2 Chatbot to the public. It’s available only to USA and UK users at the moment.
Anthopic, which was founded by former members of the OpenAI research team, aims to be a more ethically-driven company. The New York Times wrote an in-depth article about the team and their concerns about the future of AI.
Although Claude 2 is new, Anthropic has been in the news for the past several months. They have raised over $750 million to date, and have a $4.1 billion valuation. Their marquee investor is Google, which is especially notable given OpenAI’s Microsoft backing. Expect OpenAI and Anthropic to compete heavily in the months to come.
Although Anthropic is eager to “play it safe” in terms of the AI’s usage, they have been bold with its capabilities. According to their announcement for Claude, the chatbot has the ability to ingest and summarize documents of up to 75,000 words at a time. That compares to only 3,000 for the base version of ChatGPT.