OpenAI’s ChatGPT faces some serious competition as the company’s rival Anthropic brings its Claude chatbot to iPhones. Anthropic, led by a group of former OpenAI employees who resigned over differences with CEO Sam Altman, has a product that already outperforms ChatGPT on some intelligence measures and now wants to win over everyday users.
“In today’s world, smartphones are at the center of how people interact with technology. To make Claude a true AI assistant, it is crucial that we meet users where they are and, in many cases, on their mobile devices,” said Scott White of Anthropic.
“We are putting the power of Claude directly in the hands of the people. It’s not just about convenience; it’s about integrating Claude into the fabric of our daily lives.”
The third version of Claude’s big language model is offered directly to users on his website in three versions: a fast and simple model called “haiku”, a slower and more powerful model called “sonnet” and, only for customers of payment, the complete “opus” System.
It’s that system that took the lead in the LMSys chatbot rankings, becoming the first AI to knock GPT-4 off the top spot, and it also made headlines for its huge “context window,” a measure of how much conversation there is. can be taken into account at any time. Opus can contain around 160,000 words, enough for a user to paste a major novel and ask follow-up questions.
However, so far, ChatGPT has faced little competition on users’ devices. OpenAI first launched its iOS app in May last year and remains one of the few cutting-edge AI models with a consumer-friendly app.
Anthropic says the Claude app will allow it to provide new features to users beyond simple ease of use. “For example, the Claude iOS app can, with the user’s consent, access the device’s camera and photo library,” White said.
“After a meeting, a business user could take a photo of a whiteboard diagram and ask Claude to summarize key points, making it easy to share important information and act on it. “Similarly, a consumer could take a photo of a plant they encounter on a hike and ask Claude to identify the species and provide more information about its characteristics and habitat.”
In addition to the iOS app, the company is also boosting its enterprise offering, with a “team” plan that allows corporate customers to purchase chatbot access for their entire staff.
“We created Anthropic to lead the frontier of AI research and safety. That’s not something you can do in the abstract. “We don’t believe we could positively influence the trajectory of the industry and inspire a race to the top in AI safety if we couldn’t compete at the frontier,” White said.
This competition seems to have effects on the market leader. On Wednesday, OpenAI changed its policies to allow users to access their entire ChatGPT history, without needing to opt-in to allow the company to train on their conversations as a quid pro quo.