4 Ways the Claude AI Chatbot Is Better Than ChatGPT – MUO – MakeUseOf
ChatGPT has led the generative AI chatbot field, but Claude AI looks like a serious contender.
Since its debut in November 2022, ChatGPT has been the undisputed top dog in the AI chatbot space. Despite the dozens of alternatives that have popped up since, few offer comparable performance.
With Anthropic's release of its Claude 2 AI model built to power the Claude AI chatbot, ChatGPT's dominance in the AI space could be in question. But what does Claude AI bring to the table that ChatGPT does not? How is Anthropic's Claude AI better than ChatGPT?
One of ChatGPT's major drawbacks is that it cannot handle prompts with more than a couple of thousand words at a time. If your prompt is longer than ChatGPT's token limit, you'll likely receive a notification that your prompt is too long and should be edited before submitting.
Currently, ChatGPT's token limit is between 4K to 8k tokens (with the potential to handle as much as 16k and 32k), depending on the model you're using. Claude AI, on the other hand, can handle prompts with as many as 100k tokens at a time which translates to around 75,000 words.
This is a humongous difference. You might not notice or appreciate the difference if you use ChatGPT for simple tasks requiring simple prompts, but it's a dealbreaker if you use ChatGPT for more complex tasks such as transcription and summarization, where you'll need to work with a large volume of text. You'll also appreciate this difference if you use ChatGPT for coding tasks that involve large swaths of code.
With Claude AI, you can load an entire book into the AI chatbot and start querying it. With ChatGPT, the limited context window means you have to break up your code or texts into smaller chunks and make do with smaller responses.
Anthropic self-identifies as an AI safety and research company. But beyond the name, the company pays a lot of attention to the safe use of AI. This is why Claude AI is rooted in the principles of Constitution AI– a method of ensuring that AI-generated content is harmless and ethically sound. The method involves laying down strict ground rules which the AI uses to decide on the ethics of its outputs.
Claude AI uses this system to ensure its output is less likely to be harmful, discriminatory, or toxic. It is also significantly harder to jailbreak Claude AI, unlike the relative ease at which people bypass the safety rules in ChatGPT. Although some people may see this as a downside, stricter safety measures ensure that AI tools like Claude AI are safe enough for children, at least theoretically.
Although it's too early to say with certainty whether Claude AI is as good as ChatGPT as a programming aid, it undoubtedly offers an overall better coding experience. Because of a limited context window, ChatGPT cannot handle the large inputs and outputs you'd need to write large, complex code.
On the other hand, you can feed thousands of lines of code to Claude AI and ask it to debug it, explain what it does, or make optimizations. Because of a large context window, Claude AI will be able to digest every bit of the code and prepare it for any action you need to perform.
ChatGPT would have difficulty digesting a large block of code or just completely refuse to work on it, especially without ChatGPT plugins. Claude AI's 100k token limit significantly improves the chatbot's usefulness as a programming tool.
One of ChatGPT's biggest limitations is its September 2021 knowledge cut-off date. Basically, this means ChatGPT lacks knowledge of events that happened after September 2021. As you'd probably agree, a lot has happened since then, but ChatGPT won't consider that when providing a response to your prompt.
Claude AI has a knowledge base cut-off date of early 2023. It might seem like a small gap, but the events that have happened during this time significantly impact the best response to a prompt. So, Claude AI might be the safer option if you need your responses to be as up-to-date as possible.
Despite the number of innovative AI chatbots that have sprung up since the launch of ChatGPT, the chatbot's superior performance has kept it as the dominant force within the AI chatbot space. While the likes of Google's Bard and Microsoft's Bing AI have been the closest competition, none have threatened ChatGPT's dominance.
But with Claude AI's current abilities and potential, ChatGPT's dominance might become debatable for the first time. Will Claude AI dethrone ChatGPT in the long run? Only time will tell.
Maxwell is a technology enthusiast who spends most of his time testing productivity software and exploring the new generation of AI chatbots. His coverage of AI has garnered over 700,000 reads and counting. With a quirky sense of humor and a passionate love for all things tech, Maxwell leverages his 8+ years of experience in tech writing to simplify complex concepts for both novices and experts alike. He has a soft spot for cutting-edge AI tools, remains a dedicated Android user, and tinkers with PHP and Python code in his free time.
