The Launch of Claude 2, a ChatGPT Rival

Anthropic, an artificial intelligence start-up founded by former OpenAI employees and backed by Google, launched a new version of its AI chat bot: Claude 2. Its predecessor, Claude 1.3, was only launched a few months prior, thus highlighting the speed at which the generative AI space is developing. Claude 2 can generate longer responses of up to 3,000 words and has improved coding and arithmetic skills. As such, it is able to provide more accurate answers to end users.

These updates are aligned with Anthropic’s aim to create a safer AI chat bot. Since ChatGPT took the world by storm in late 2022, the technology industry has seen a flood of generative AI tools. These tools, which are built on large language models, are trained to generate plausible-sounding language. However, they also present potential risks, including the generation of harmful or offensive answers in response to prompt manipulation by end users. In distinguishing itself from its rivals, Anthropic has claimed that Claude 2 is “less likely to produce harmful outputs”. 

Claude 2 is now available to the public in the US and UK for the first time. The previous version was only available to businesses and was successfully tested by companies, such as Quora Inc., Slack, and Zoom. To date, Anthropic has raised over US$1 billion in funding, which points to the industry’s recognition of the need to mitigate AI risk. The company continues to work on the chatbot’s limitations and plans to make it available in more countries in the coming months.