Bonjour, Claude

Today (well, a couple of days ago ...) marks a big day, with a new AI model called Claude 2 from a San Francisco-based company called Anthropic ... it's not actually French, so the header image and title are just my embellishments!

I'm writing about Claude because it is a real top-shelf competitor to ChatGPT and is worth being on your radar if you missed it. It's missing the broad support across Azure & Microsoft applications that ChatGPT has, but I've found it to be superior in many other ways (for now!).

1. It allows you to upload files to use in your prompts
2. It can consider WAY more text in a prompt, as much text as you might find in a large / long book
3. It's somewhere in the range of 4x-5x cheaper for developers to use (i.e. the 'cost per token is much lower')

There are some other differences in terms of how it keeps its responses safe, aiming to follow the UN constitution amongst other things.

For marketers and content creators, Jasper AI uses the Claude system to generate content and marketing / promotional copy. I've not tried this yet, however this is clearly a brave new frontier for media & marketing and is one to watch.

I've personally found Claude to be a joy to use. The file upload and larger text prompts have been a major game changer for me. For instance, as I look at use cases in my consulting work, I can now capture transcripts of a multi-hour meeting and have Claude summarise and capture minutes of the meeting. It's actually a real game changer and massive time saver that simply wasn't possible with ChatGPT as it is today!

This is a very strong indicator that ChatGPT is not a one-off unicorn and we can expect many competitors and lots of innovation in this space over time.

I should mention that, as of writing, Claude is only available in the US and the UK so is tricky to access if you're not in those countries.

That's it for today. Stay safe out there.