AI Start-Up Anthropic challenges OpenAI and Google with new chatbot
High-profile AI start-up Anthropic released a new version of its Claude chatbot on Monday, saying it outperforms other leading chatbots on a range of standard benchmark tests, including systems from Google and OpenAI.
Dario Amodei, CEO and co-founder of Anthropic, said the new technology, called Claude 3 Opus, was especially useful when analyzing scientific data or generating computer code.
Anthropic is one of a small group of companies at the forefront of generative AI, technology that instantly creates text, images and sounds. Dr. Amodei and other Anthropic founders helped pioneer the technology while working as researchers at OpenAI, the startup that launched the generative AI boom in late 2022 with the release of the chatbot ChatGPT.
Chatbots like ChatGPT can answer questions, write theses, generate small computer programs and more. They can also generate false or misleading information, just like humans do.
When OpenAI released a new version of its technology last spring, called GPT-4, it was widely considered the most powerful chatbot technology used by both consumers and businesses. Google recently introduced a similar technology called Gemini.
But the leading companies in artificial intelligence have been distracted by one controversy after another. They say the computer chips needed to build AI are in short supply. And they face numerous lawsuits over the way they collect digital data, another ingredient essential to the creation of AI (The New York Times has sued Microsoft and OpenAI for using copyrighted work.)
Yet technology continues to improve at a remarkable pace.
Anthropic claims that its Claude 3 Opus technology outperforms both GPT-4 and Gemini in mathematical problem solving, computer coding, general knowledge and other areas.
Claude 3 Opus will be available starting Monday to consumers who pay $20 per month for a subscription. A less powerful version, called Claude 3 Sonnet, is available for free.
The company enables companies to build their own chatbots and other services using its Opus and Sonnet technologies.
Both versions of the technology can respond to images as well as text. For example, these might analyze a flowchart or solve a math problem that includes diagrams and graphs.
But the technology cannot generate images. Google recently suspended Gemini’s ability to generate human faces after it produced images of people of color in German military uniforms from World War II.