ChatGPT has some formidable competitors. One of them is Claude, from the American company Anthropic. With the new model 3.5 Sonnet, Anthropic even claims to be better than ChatGPT. For a long time, Claude was not available in Europe, but since May 2024 you can also use it in the Netherlands and Belgium. What is Claude and how does it differ from other AI tools such as ChatGPT? In this article I will dive deeper into that.
What is Claude?
Claude is the AI chatbot from Anthropic (founded in 2021 by former employees of OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT). The large language model (LLM) that runs it has the same name. The chatbot was released in March 2023, but as mentioned, it has only recently become officially available for use in the EU.
You can have conversations with it, similar to ChatGPT. For example, it can summarize texts for you, generate Excel formulas, extract insights from reports and more. You can use it for content creation and optimization, market research, data analysis and customer service.
It is also able to analyze and transcribe images, so it can recognize handwritten texts, photos and graphs.
You can visit Claude at claude.aiThere is also a iOS-app available (no Android yet) and a API.
Image source: Anthropic
Getting started with Claude: comprehensive onboarding
The first time you visit Claude.ai, you have to create an account. Then you go through an extensive onboarding. That makes it a bit less accessible than ChatGPT, which you can now also use without a login (but with limitations). But it is an interesting process, in which Anthropic clearly points out the limits and shortcomings of the tool.
After entering your email address, you will also need to provide your phone number and date of birth. The phone number is used to send a verification code. Once you have passed that hurdle, you will be asked if you want to use the tool personally or with your team. For this article, I chose personal use.
Then Claude introduces himself to you and the chatbot wants to know your name.
The bot then points you again to the ‘usage policy‘ (for example, you may not use it to create violent or misleading content) and that it regularly checks conversations to improve security. Once you agree, Claude also points out that it is not perfect. You should take into account that it sometimes produces incorrect or misleading information (comparable to other AI bots), that it is not intended for advice (such as medical advice) and that it can change usage limits.
Once you’ve completed these steps, you’ll be taken to the home screen and can start chatting!
Available versions
The free version gives you access to the Claude 3.5 Sonnet model, which was launched in mid-June 2024. Anthropic claims that this model is currently ‘best-in-class‘ is, so better than ChatGPT’s GPT-4o. In addition, you have Claude Haiku (the fastest model) and Claude Opus (for in-depth analyses and other complex tasks, among other things).
Image source: Anthropic
Claude Pro
If you have a paid Pro account, you can use Claude 3 Haiku and Claude 3 Opus via the ‘model selector’. A paid account has the following advantages:
- Higher usage limit: you can send more messages
- Greater input capacity: you can process longer texts and more complex commands
- Faster response times (especially with Haiku, which is also for chatbots for customer service can be used)
- Priority access to Claude when traffic is very busy
Claude Pro currently costs 18 euros per month. If you want to switch from the free version to the paid version, log in to Claude.ai and choose the option ‘Upgrade to Pro’.
Claude Team
Through Claude Team (30 dollars per user per month) you have the possibility to collaborate with colleagues. Here are some advantages of Claude Team:
- Higher usage limit
- Access to multiple models (including Opus and Haiku)
- Admin Tools
- And everything you also get in the paid Pro account
In the video below you’ll see an example of how you can use the Team options to build a marketing plan, based on existing documents with information about your target audiences and tone of voice.
Some disadvantages
I haven’t been using Claude for very long, but so far I have experienced the following disadvantages:
- Claude cannot create a summary of an article based on a URL (see image below). However, you can put the text of the article in Claude and ask for a summary. And it does that well.
- Claude’s knowledge is based on data up to April 2024 and has no active access to the internet.
- Claude doesn’t give sources for his answers, so you have no idea where the information comes from. That feels outdated now, the free version of ChatGPT does this already.
- It is not yet ‘multi-modal’. Yes, you can upload text and images. But it only generates text so far.
- No voice. You can’t talk to it yet.
The advantages of Claude over ChatGPT
There are a number of ways in which Anthropic pits Claude against ChatGPT:
- You will notice during onboarding that there is a strong focus on safety and responsible AI development. Anthropic writes that the AI is not trained based on your dataeven in the free version. There are 3 exceptions: if your prompt or conversation is detected for review (to check if it meets the policies), if you give feedback yourself (via thumbs up / thumbs down) or if you otherwise explicitly give permission to train the AI on your input.
- It also currently has a larger ‘context window’, allowing you to provide longer text to the chatbot.
- Anthropic claims to outperform ChatGPT GPT-4o in many areas, including programming and mathematics.
Whether the latter is true, you will have to try it out yourself. It depends a lot on the tasks. In any case, I notice that the AI tool is good at summarizing articles and PDFs, but when generating a formula for Google Spreadsheets, ChatGPT was better.
Artifacts
The beta version of the component Artifacts is impressive and deserves extra attention. In a separate side screen, you can create games and see them in action right away, without any knowledge of coding. Because it is in a separate screen, you can easily make improvements via the chat screen. There are already countless examples of games, but you can also create and improve texts, make flowcharts, create interactive images or reports and build interactive quizzes based on a PDF to test your knowledge. You can now turn this component on in Claude (also in the free version).
Are you going to use Claude?
I think the focus on security and privacy is a big advantage of Claude and the handy interface of Artifacts could well be copied by competitors. These are good reasons to use this tool more often. Do you already use Claude and would you like to share why it is a useful tool for you? I would love to hear your experiences via the comments below!
Header image source: PatrickAssale / Shutterstock.com
Source: www.frankwatching.com
