What Is Claude AI and Why Should You Use It? – MUO – MakeUseOf
ChatGPT has a serious contender on the cards.
The surge in the development of large language models (LLMs) has come with many challenges, including issues with content, focus, and privacy.
However, harmlessness, speed, and accuracy are crucial features of AI systems that significantly impact their effectiveness and utility—and are the key features many users want to see.
Now, Claude stands out as one of the most versatile chatbots in the market with its general purpose, harmless, and efficient design, and it's only getting better.
Claude is an AI chatbot designed to be helpful, honest, and harmless. It is available in three versions: Claude 1, Claude 2, and Claude Instant. Claude 2 is the successor to Claude 1, trained with a larger dataset to perform better with a larger context window, while Claude Instant is a faster and more cost-effective model suitable for casual conversations, text analysis, summarization, and document-based queries and responses.
Here’s an overview of the differences and similarities between Claude 1, Claude 2, and Claude Instant.
Feature
Claude 1
Claude 2
Claude Instant
Model Size
137B parameters
175B parameters
100K tokens
Capabilities
Sophisticated dialog, creative content generation, detailed instructions
All Claude 1 features plus academic features and more.
Casual dialog, text analysis, and summarization, document Q&A
Cost per Token
$32.68/million tokens
$32.68/million tokens
$5.51/million tokens
Performance
Good at complex tasks
Excellent at complex tasks
Good at casual tasks
Context Window
75,000 tokens
100,000 tokens
75,000 tokens
All versions of Claude are trained on an extensive text and code dataset, enabling them to perform various tasks. These tasks include summarizing text, searching for information, and generating creative outputs like poems, code, scripts, musical pieces, emails, and letters. Claude also excels at answering questions and collaborating with humans on creative projects.
Claude is trained on a meticulously filtered dataset, ensuring harmful content exclusion, and Anthropic consistently monitors Claude’s performance to mitigate safety risks. Furthermore, Anthropic has confirmed Claude's training data cut-off point is December 2022, but "may know some events into early 2023." Claude's up-to-date information gives it an advantage over ChatGPT's data cut-off point of September 2021, which is one of the reasons Claude is better than ChatGPT.
Here are several reasons why Claude is preferable to other AI chatbots and tools:
Claude delivers many of the best AI chatbot features, and its unique approach to training means it's likely safer than other artificial intelligence tools.
There are many ways to use Claude and its various models.
Anthropic provides an API for interacting with Claude, and many popular applications use Claude to fuel their functionality. For example, Anthropic provides an API and a Claude Slack bot with multiple features for interacting with Claude. Claude can remember your entire Slack thread or pull content from websites you share with it.
You can use Anthropic’s web console to access the Claude API. The web console allows you to assess Claude's capabilities before integrating it into your technical setup. Once you can access the Console, you can generate API keys and start building with the AI.
Claude is currently in its open beta stage and available for users in the UK or US at Claude.ai.
There are many potential applications for Claude, but here are five to get you going.
Those are some of the ways you can use Claude. Companies are also integrating Claude directly into apps and other platforms.
For example, online education provider Juni Learning uses Claude to power their Discord Juni Tutor Bot to help students achieve academic success by delivering high-quality, in-depth responses, while Notion’s Claude integration enhances Claude's creative writing and summarization abilities.
Claude 2 is a significant improvement over Claude 1. It has twice the number of parameters and a larger context window and has been programmed to reduce the likelihood of generating biased or harmful content.
Goodness is a highly experienced technical writer and backend engineer who specializes in building scalable systems using Go and Rust. With 4 years of industry experience and 3 years of technical writing experience, Goodness has honed his skills in these languages and enjoys sharing his knowledge with the community.
Aside from his contributions to MUO, Goodness has also written over 200 technical articles for reputable companies such as DigitalOcean, LogRocket, MatterMost, and FreeCodeCamp. His writing focuses on topics related to Go, Rust, Web3, data, and backend engineering. Goodness’s articles are highly regarded in the industry for their quality, depth, and relevance.
Goodness’s expertise in these areas is supported by his certifications in Go and Rust, as well as his attendance at industry conferences and his efforts to stay up-to-date on the latest trends and technologies. He is a passionate and dedicated professional who is always striving to improve his skills and knowledge.
