A competitor to the market leader OpenAI expresses a desire to “meet users where they are” and integrate into their daily lives
OpenAI’s ChatGPT is facing significant competition from Anthropic, a company whose Claude chatbot is now available on iPhones. Anthropic, led by former OpenAI employees who left due to disagreements with CEO Sam Altman, has a product that surpasses ChatGPT in some measures of intelligence and aims to attract regular users.
“In today’s world, smartphones play a central role in how people interact with technology. To truly make Claude an AI assistant, it’s essential that we engage users where they are – and often, that’s on their mobile devices,” said Scott White of Anthropic.
“We’re empowering users by putting Claude directly into their hands. This goes beyond mere convenience; it’s about seamlessly integrating Claude into the fabric of our daily lives.”
The third iteration of the Claude large language model is available directly to users on its website in three versions: a quick and straightforward model called “haiku,” a slower and more robust model called “sonnet,” and, exclusively for paying customers, the complete “opus” system.
The opus system took the lead in the LMSys chatbot ranking, surpassing GPT-4 to become the first AI to do so. It gained attention for its extensive “context window,” which indicates how much of a conversation it can remember. Opus can retain approximately 160,000 words, allowing users to paste in a lengthy novel and ask follow-up questions.
So far, ChatGPT has had little competition on users’ devices. OpenAI initially launched its iOS app in May last year, and it remains one of the few advanced AI models with a consumer-friendly app.
Anthropic believes the Claude app will offer new features to users beyond simple ease of use. “For example, the Claude iOS app can, with user consent, access the device’s camera and photo library,” White explained.
“Following a meeting, a business user could snap a photo of a whiteboard diagram and ask Claude to summarize the key points, facilitating the sharing and utilization of important information. Similarly, a consumer could photograph a plant encountered during a hike and ask Claude to identify the species and provide additional information about its characteristics and habitat.”
In addition to the iOS app, the company is enhancing its business offerings with a “team” plan that enables corporate customers to purchase chatbot access for their entire staff.
“We founded Anthropic to pioneer AI safety and research. This is not something you can achieve in theory. We believe we wouldn’t be able to positively impact the industry’s direction and encourage a push towards AI safety if we weren’t able to compete at the forefront,” White stated.
This competition seems to be influencing the market leader. On Wednesday, OpenAI modified its policies to enable users to access their complete ChatGPT history without requiring them to opt in for the company to train on their conversations as a trade-off.
