OpenAI’s ChatGPT is facing serious competition, as the company’s rival Anthropic brings its Claude chatbot to iPhones. Anthropic, led by a group of former OpenAI staff who quit over differences with chief executive Sam Altman, have a product that already beats ChatGPT on some measures of intelligence, and now wants to win over everyday users.
“In today’s world, smartphones are at the centre of how people interact with technology. To make Claude a true AI assistant, it’s crucial that we meet users where they are – and in many cases, that’s on their mobile devices,” said Scott White at Anthropic.
“We’re putting the power of Claude directly into people’s hands. It’s not just about convenience; it’s about integrating Claude into the fabric of our daily lives.”
The third version of the Claude large language model is offered direct to users on its website in three flavours: a speedy and simple model called “haiku”, a slower and more powerful model called “sonnet”, and, for paying customers only, the full “opus” system.
It is that system that took the lead in the LMSys chatbot ranking, becoming the first AI to knock GPT-4 out of pole position, and it also made headlines for its enormous “context window” – a measure of how much of a conversation it can keep in mind at any one time. Opus can hold about 160,000 words, enough for a user to paste in a weighty novel and ask follow-up questions.
Until now, though, ChatGPT has faced little competition on users’ devices. OpenAI first released its iOS app in May last year, and it remains one of the few frontier AI models with an accessible consumer app.
Anthropic says the Claude app will allow it to bring new features to users, beyond simple ease of use. “For example, the Claude iOS app can, with a user’s consent, access the device’s camera and photo library,” White said.
“After a meeting, a business user could snap a photo of a whiteboard diagram and ask Claude to summarise the key points, making it easier to share and act upon important information. Similarly, a consumer could take a picture of a plant they encounter on a hike and ask Claude to identify the species and provide more information about its characteristics and habitat.”
Alongside the iOS app, the company is also boosting its business offering, with a “team” plan that lets corporate customers buy chatbot access for their entire staff.
“We started Anthropic to lead the frontier of AI safety and research. That isn’t something you can do in the abstract. We don’t think we’d be able to positively influence the industry’s trajectory and inspire a race to the top on AI safety if we weren’t able to compete at the frontier,” White said.
That competition appears to be having an effect 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 allowing the company to train on their conversations as a quid pro quo.
