Claude 2, the Closest Competitor to ChatGPT, Enters the US & UK Markets

Anthropic, a US-based start-up specializing in Artificial Intelligence, has launched its conversational chatbot, Claude 2, in the United States and the United Kingdom. With its release, Claude 2 aims to rival OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT, which has gained significant attention since its launch in 2022. Anthropic claims that Claude 2 offers several advantages over its competitor, including a larger context window and a superior intelligence-to-cost ratio compared to GPT-4.

In an official blog post, Anthropic stated, “We are excited to introduce Claude 2, our latest model. Claude 2 delivers improved performance, longer responses, and can be accessed via API, as well as a new public-facing beta website, claude.ai.”

While Claude 2 slightly lags behind ChatGPT, it provides a comparable coding experience with the added benefits of fresher training data and increased contextual support. Notably, Claude 2 boasts the largest context window to date, allowing users to input extensive documents, reports, and PDFs and receive summaries in seconds. Additionally, the chatbot’s API is reportedly nearly five times cheaper than its counterparts.

The blog post further mentions, “When compared to college students applying to graduate school, Claude 2 scores above the 90th percentile on the GRE reading and writing exams, and similarly to the median applicant on quantitative reasoning.”

In a Claude 2 vs GPT-4 comparison, Claude 2 emerges as a more cost-effective option while delivering stronger reasoning and coding capabilities than its predecessor, Claude 1. While ChatGPT outperforms Claude in verbal, quantitative, and USMLE exams, Claude surpasses ChatGPT in GRE writing and Bar exams. Claude 2 comes with a context size of 100,000 words, which is almost five times larger than GPT-4’s 32,000 words. Furthermore, prompt tokens are priced lower than completion tokens, with costs of $11 compared to $60 per million tokens in GPT-4. Similarly, completion costs are $32 compared to $120 per million tokens, assuming both models have similar tokenization lengths.

Users in the United States and the United Kingdom can easily visit Anthropic’s website and sign up for free to access Claude 2. By clicking on the ‘Talk to Claude’ option and providing an email address, users can begin using the chatbot after confirming their email.

Anthropic is backed by Daniela and Dario Amodei, former senior members of the OpenAI team. Although Claude 2 is still in its early stages, it presents itself as a viable alternative to ChatGPT in terms of performance.