Alphabet-backed Anthropic launches Claude, a large language model to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT

Just last week, we wrote about Anthropic after the Alphabet-backed AI startup announced it was close to raising $300 million from investors at around a $5 billion valuation. Co-founded by former OpenAI employees, Anthropic came into the spotlight following the popularity of ChatGPT. Now Anthropic team has just released its own chatbot to take on ChatGPT, the popular chatbot developed by their former employer.

Today, Anthropic announced the launch of Claude, a large language model that competes directly with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Claude is designed to perform tasks similar to ChatGPT’s. Its main function is to generate text that is similar to human writing when prompted, regardless of the task at hand, be it editing legal contracts or writing computer code.

However, Anthropic, which was co-founded by OpenAI’s former VP of research Dario Amodei and his sister Daniela Amodei, has put a focus on producing AI systems that are less “woke” and unlikely to generate offensive or dangerous content, such as instructions for computer hacking or making weapons, than other systems.

Generative Pre-training Transformer (GPT) is a type of language model developed by OpenAI. It is a neural network-based model that is trained to generate human-like text by predicting the next word in a sequence based on the words that come before it. ChatGPT and other generative AI tools use a large language model (LLM) technique to generate text in a chat-like or conversational style.

Given the number of resources used by these language models, only a few LLM-based products are actually making money. But new LLM products are beginning to come to the markets.

The popularity of OpenAI ChatGPT has now led to a boom in the adoption of generative artificial intelligence (AI) and big tech companies and small startups alike are in a race to integrate it into their products. Since its launch in November, ChatGPT has impressed many experts with its writing ability, software coding, proficiency in handling complex tasks, and its ease of use.

In May 2021, the startup raised $124 million in funding from high-profile investors led by Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, with participation from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, James McClave, Dustin Moskovitz, and the Center for Emerging Risk Research, among others.

Based in Silicon Valley, Anthropic was founded by OpenAI’s former VP of research Dario Amodei. Sensing that generative artificial intelligence is going to have a major impact on the world, Dario struck out with his sister Daniela to create “large-scale AI systems that are steerable, interpretable, and robust.”

In a post on Twitter back then, Daniela said: “Excited to announce what we’ve been working on this year – @AnthropicAI
, an AI safety and research company. If you’d like to help us combine safety research with scaling ML models while thinking about societal impacts, check out our careers page http://anthropic.com/#careers”

Excited to announce what we’ve been working on this year – @AnthropicAI, an AI safety and research company. If you’d like to help us combine safety research with scaling ML models while thinking about societal impacts, check out our careers page https://t.co/TVHA0t7VLc

— Daniela Amodei (@DanielaAmodei) May 28, 2021

Founded in 2021 by Dario Amodei (CEO), Daniela Amodei, Jack Clark, Sam McCandlish, and Tom Brown, Anthropic is working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. For now, the startup is primarily focusing on research towards these goals; down the road, we foresee many opportunities for our work to create value commercially and for public benefit, the company said on its website. To date, Anthropic has raised a total of $704 million in funding over 2 rounds. Its latest funding was raised on Apr 29, 2022, from a Series B round.