Claude 2: What it is and how to use Claude AI
Claude AI has received wide public attention due to its deep commitment to AI safety and its ability to summarize novel-sized chunks of text, making it potentially one of the best AI chatbots to explore if that’s one of your preferred uses of the technology. Yet, while the upgraded chatbot offers the tantalizing promise of a slightier rosier AI future than some predict, it’s, as of yet, not fully available. However, you can try it out via beta access, if you live in the UK or US.Here’s everything you need to know about the chatbot – including how and where to try it out for yourself.
What is Claude AI?
First released in April 2022, Claude is an AI chatbot launched by artificial intelligence safety startup company Anthropic.
Trained on a technique called Constitutional AI, Anthropic aims to create AI systems that are helpful to humans, while avoiding unintended harmful behaviors that could emerge from uncontrolled AI systems of the future by following a set of safety rules drawn from sources such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The chatbot looks to align its goals and values with human preferences without offering any subjective opinion or distinct visual avatar or personality, like Character AI that lets you converse with any chat based on any character you desire or HuggingChat offers its users a friendly, human-like chat voice.
Claude AI is therefore best described as being closest to Google Bard and ChatGPT in style and is even being billed as a rival to OpenAI’s ever-popular AI bot.
Claude 2 was released in July 2022 with improved conversational abilities and a deeper understanding of contexts, and features double the parameters (860 million vs 430 million) of the original Claude model.
One of the key features of Claude 2 is that it can handle novel-sized blocks of text of up to 75,000 words and it features a strong focus on AI and user safety.
Is Claude 2 free?
While Claude 2 is not free, Anthropic has currently not publicly disclosed the pricing model for licensing Claude 2.
At present, it is meant for integration into customer applications and services. However, Anthropic does offer a limited free trial of Claude 2 on its website for interested parties to test out its capabilities.
How to access Claude 2
Claude 2 is currently available in open beta for users in the US and UK.
If you’d like to sign up for free to try the chatbot, visit Anthropic’s website and click on the button “Talk to Claude.” You’ll then be prompted to sign up with your email address or enter an existing address to access the bot.
Alternatively, you can also access the most powerful versions of both Claude and Claude 2 that have an increased context window (aka how much information the model can remember and consider when generating its response) of 100k tokens (around 75,000 words) via Poe.
Usage is currently limited to 100 messages per month for Poe subscribers when exploring Claude-instant-100k.
Is Claude 2 better than ChatGPT?
The feature that makes Claude a potential ChatGPT killer is its ability to handle and recall larger amounts of information.
Users can input up to 100K tokens, which corresponds to around 75,000 words. By comparison, GPT-4 is theoretically capable of context windows ranging somewhere between 8K and 32K tokens.
While Claude offers an easy way to upload a PDF that can then be summarized using a prompt, it should also be noted that ChatGPT-4 has a range of plugins via its ChatGPT Plus subscription that specializes in doing just that, as well as offering a huge amount of additional capabilities through its plugin store.
Claude 2 is still in beta but it looks like, unlike OpenAI’s GPT-4, it can’t search the web once its existing training set goes out of date.
Both chatbots are still highly susceptible to bias and hallucination, however, whereby AI will confidently generate false information, and both can not be used for professional advice, such as matters concerning medical, financial, or legal issues.
How to use Claude AI
Once you’ve logged in to Claude, you’ll be able to engage in conversation with the bot by using the ‘Start a new chat’ option on the chat window.
Alternatively, the platform also suggests three example uses from the outset you can click on to try the system out, which includes the platform’s ability to summarize large documentation.
Claude can accept up to 5 files, up to 10MB each, including PDFs, text, and CSV files that can be added using the paperclip icon before a prompt is entered.
Anthropic recommends speaking to Claude “like you would a coworker or friend” so can handle the typical question format that’s familiar to any user of a chatbot; writing a few sentences simply and clearly can be sufficient for getting the response you need.
However, if you’d like Claude to respond in a specific format or are interested in advanced prompt design, Anthropic recommends giving Claude as much context and detail as possible, as well as any rules for completing the task correctly.
It’s advised to use this format due to how the platform has been trained to identify who is speaking:
Human:
Assistant:
In addition, users can mark different parts of the prompt by using XML tags, as Claude has been fine-tuned to pay special attention to this structure.
Tags like <text> and </text> can mark the beginning and end of the text that Claude needs to de-identify.
Anthropic indicates the below as being a few well-constructed prompts you can try out:
Prompt example 1
Human: We want to de-identify some text by removing all personally identifiable information from this text so that it can be shared safely with external contractors. PII such as names, phone numbers, and home and email addresses must get replaced with XXX.
Here is the text, inside <text></text> XML tags. <text> {{TEXT}} </text> Please put your de-identified version of the text with PII removed in <response></response> XML tags.
Assistant:
Prompt example 2
Human: Here is an article, contained in <article> tags: <article> {{ARTICLE}} </article>
Please identify any grammatical errors in the article that are missing from the following list: <list> 1. There is a missing full stop in the first sentence. 2. The word “their” is misspelled as “they’re” in the third sentence. </list>
If there are no errors in the article that are missing from the list, say “There are no additional errors.”
FAQs about Claude AI:
What is Claude AI?
Claude is a large language model (LLM) chatbot developed by Anthropic. It is trained on a massive dataset of text and code and can generate text, translate languages, write different kinds of creative content, and answer your questions in an informative way.
What can Claude AI do?
Claude AI can do a variety of things, including:
- Generate text: Claude AI can generate text that is similar to human-written text. This can be used for a variety of purposes, such as creating content for websites or writing blog posts.
- Translate languages: Claude AI can translate languages accurately and fluently. This can be useful for communicating with people who speak different languages.
- Write different kinds of creative content: Claude AI can write different kinds of creative content, such as poems, code, scripts, musical pieces, emails, letters, etc.
- Answer your questions in an informative way: AI can answer your questions in an informative way, even if they are open-ended, challenging, or strange.
How does Claude AI work?
Claude AI works by using a technique called deep learning. Deep learning is a type of machine learning that uses artificial neural networks to learn from data. Claude AI’s neural networks are trained on a massive dataset of text and code, which allows it to generate text, translate languages, write different kinds of creative content, and answer your questions in an informative way.
Is Claude AI safe to use?
Claude AI is safe to use. It is not programmed to harm humans or spread misinformation. However, it is important to use Claude AI responsibly and ethically. For example, you should not use Claude AI to generate content that is hateful or discriminatory.
How can I get started?
You can get started by visiting the Claude AI website. You can also sign up for the Claude AI waitlist to be notified when it is available to the public.
