Among the new giants in AI chatbot, Claude stands out for several reasons. According to Anthropic’s website, their models have very low hallucination rates and high accuracy over longer documents.
In this overview, we will investigate what Claude is, how it was developed and how it works. We will then go over how AI-generated content works, and what sets Claude’s apart.
What is Claude AI?
According to Anthropic, the company that created Claude, it is a “next-generation AI assistant.” In practice, think of it as an AI chatbot. However, Claude does offer a lot of assistance as its chatbot functionality enables it to:
Generate written content
Present information in a more structured way
Attempt to provide more helpful and honest information with more careful guardrails
Claude is one of many new language learning models (LLM) that have followed in the footsteps of ChatGPT. That means that Claude’s AI chatbot was trained to produce naturally flowing, conversational text. This training model means that Claude was made to be more ideally suited to tasks like:
Proofreading or contextual editing
Summarization
Q&A sessions
Writing code
Producing stories
Helping with decision-making
How well Claude completes these tasks is another question. First, many people considering using Claude are probably wondering how it compares to other popular AI models. Second, we have to consider the inputs we want to give to AI LLMs and how well-suited they are to handle them. How any AI model responds to a query depends on how concise and understandable your query text is.
Overall, Claude is a young startup, having launched in March 2023. Since then, Anthropic has upgraded Claude with new functionalities and improved its original functions with the Claude 2 and Claude 3 updates. To date, there have been three major versions of Claude:
Claude 1
After the first iteration, the first major revision, Claude 1.3, marked the biggest jump from Anthropic’s concept toward a highly-functional AI chatbot for the public.
During this first iteration, Anthropic introduced Claude as the result of extensive research into “helpful, honest, and harmless AI systems.” At the time, Claude’s AI chat was accessible through the standard chat interfaces that most AI users are now familiar with. Claude could already complete many conversational tasks and process information quickly and reliably.
Crucially, even from the start, Anthropic differentiated Claude with its focus on safety. It was designed to be far less likely than alternatives to produce harmful content. Anthropic also aimed to continually make the chatbot more steerable so users could get it to complete tasks in more specific ways, expanding its use cases.
Early on, Claude 1 achieved a lot of success in partnerships with significant websites like Quora and Notion.
Claude 2
Claude 2 came out in July 2023, offering improved performance, as well as some new features:
Faster speeds
Better overall quality
Longer and more detailed responses
A public-facing beta website for new users to try
Among the major accomplishments Anthropic has used to measure the success of Claude’s updates is the BAR exam. According to the company, Claude 2 scored over 3 points higher on the BAR exam than Claude 1, going from 73% to 76.5%, versus ChatGPT’s 50.3%.
In addition to longer and better responses, users could also provide far more input and still get great output. How Claude processed responses improved so that more complexity could be processed for both inputs and outputs.
Claude 3
In March 2024, Anthropic partnered with Google Cloud, giving the company access to Google’s cloud computing. Much of this likely helped Google with their own AI tools. However, this $1.5 billion partnership did demonstrate Claude’s growing importance in the AI industry. It was also a major milestone in Claude’s development.
The 3 AI models of Claude 3 offer new capabilities for organization and chatbot roles. The 3 distinct models include:
Claude 3 Opus. A newer and more intelligent AI model that’s built for more demanding tasks.
Claude 3 Sonnet. The premium model offers high speed and processing skills, but at a much higher cost than the others.
Claude 3 Haiku. A sleeker and more compact model made for optimal speed.
Then, In June 2024, Anthropic released Claude 3.5 Sonnet, an upgraded version of the original Sonnet, as well as the first entry into the new 3.5 family. This latest version of the AI model outperformed even the previous highest tier of Opus. Anthropic plans to upgrade both Haitu and Opus later in 2024.
Image credit: anthropic.com
Overall, these are the models that we are speaking of in this overview. They are the popular models that have gained Claude new renown and opportunities. Overall, Claude 3 Opus and Sonnet offer the best reasoning for many different responsibilities, while Haiku offers the best speed and cost-efficiency.
How Does Claude AI Work?
From a Claude user’s perspective, it takes some playing around to see the differences between different AI models. After all, we can’t see the inner workings of a chatbot when we’re just typing away at them.
Claude is a large language model (LLM) capable of understanding language and processing information at high speeds.
All of the Claude models are language-only models. What sets each apart is simply their capabilities. However, Claude’s most recent versions are continuously trained on up-to-date information.
LLM Technology
As an LLM, Claude is an AI model that was trained to learn from text and generate language that mimics human communication. To do so, Claude was trained on massive quantities of text data from many different sources.
LLM training is mainly focused on studying the structure of human language. That’s why Claude and others often sound so human in their responses. They pick up on structural patterns, common conversational themes, and general knowledge demonstrated in their training materials.
To make LLMs dynamic and useful, they are built on deep learning. They are artificial neural networks that process information through multiple layers. When an LLM is given an input, it is processed through its neural network, relying on its training to generate relevant responses.
Translating Deep Learning into Text
Moving through a single, complex neural network is possible because of transformer-based architecture. Transformer models learn context by tracking the relationships in any kind of sequential data. Impressively, this now includes not only each word in a sentence, but also things like punctuation marks.
Transformers are a young technology recognized as early as 2017 for their potential to rapidly expand AI.
What Makes Claude Different?
Claude originally began as a competitor to GPT 3, launched by OpenAI. Its underlying technology and principles are largely similar. Anthropic took another point of view, shifting the focus toward helpful responses and safety.
Anthropic’s Constitutional AI
Claude’s unique approach to AI language generation is Anthropic’s patented Constitutional AI. Constitutional AI aims to more closely track where and how Anthropic’s AI models are put to use. It also involves tracking the accuracy of the output and the impact it ends up having in particular industries and contexts.
As an end user, you can expect Claude to provide more conservative answers, depending on the query and the context.
The more careful answers that Claude gives may sometimes save you from the negative consequences of relying on an AI bot for factual information. But assuming you’re just looking for direction, ChatGPT may point you in a better direction.
For example, take this answer to a normal question surrounding a topic that garners a lot of controversy online. Both of these answers to the same question were gathered with each platform’s free plan:
Image credit: ChatGPT.
Image credit: Claude.
Both popular tools take a conservative approach to answering this question and point you in a similar direction. But you can see the difference in Claude’s reluctance to provide what could be interpreted as data at all.
Is Claude AI Safe?
Claude users widely regard it as a simple and reliable tool. Verified reviews on neutral platforms like G2 generally confirm these facts. But how can you use Claude safely and ensure it doesn’t get you into trouble?
In terms of personal data security and potentially harmful content, Claude is actually safer than most alternatives. They don’t retain user data and make a strong commitment to user safety. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t get into trouble if you misuse their tool.
Successful generative AI tools built with expert, dedicated teams like Claude’s have many important use cases. But they should still not be used for illegal purposes or to write a college essay. Claude’s Terms of Service make clear that they have no responsibility for your use or misuse of generated content. Even without their thorough disclaimer, you are responsible for any content you present or publish that you made with their chatbot.
Given that, you should remember to always follow the law and any rules you agree to in your role as an employee, contractor, or student.
Is Claude AI Factually Accurate?
We’ve gone over one example of how Claude answers questions already. But what about more niche information?
Image credit: Claude.
Where you may notice a difference is when you start to push the AI chatbots to take a decisive stand on an issue where factual accuracy is a concern.
In the end, these are one-off, isolated examples. Fortunately, some institutions have started collecting data on AI chatbot’s factual accuracy. The data is sparse, but one study by Alexander Muacevic and John R Adler found that Claude outperformed alternatives in relevance and completeness. More importantly, it outperformed ChatGPT, Google Bard, and Perplexity AI in several categories when covering serious medical queries for which a user’s health would be hanging in the balance if they were to take the results seriously. Claude consistently provided more relevant and complete results. However, it didn’t do much better or worse in terms of accuracy.
Image credit: National Library of Medicine.
In short, the findings demonstrated that:
Claude provides more detailed, complete answers overall.
Claude is working with more data than the alternatives.
Claude presents information clearly.
However, this study notes the risks of bias, lack of dynamic decision-making, and fixed behavior of AI chatbots. We should also make clear that while this data is very interesting, it is not a call for AI to be used for healthcare decisions, or other important matters.
This study and others also demonstrate that factual accuracy is not something any AI model has a monopoly over. All the major AI models, including Claude, have disclaimers explaining that they can make mistakes and that their answers should be double-checked.
Image credit: Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts
The good news is that while Claude 2 was shown to provide factual accuracies, such as failing a humanities test with lower marks than some alternatives, the model has improved over time. One study reported that while subject experts vastly outperformed Claude 3 Opus, the newer model performs better than alternatives.
Is There a Downside to Claude?
As far as the use of Claude’s chatbot, no extraordinary downsides have been discovered so far.
Studies have revealed that Claude works similarly to its peer competitors, but offers some unique benefits that those competitors do not.
To ensure safety and ethical outcomes with Claude or other AI tools, use them in a way that:
Follows their terms and conditions
Does not break any local laws
Does not break any institutional rules
Using AI for academic or professional writing, coding, or other tasks may violate:
The integrity expected of students or professionals in an institution
Anti-AI rules or laws
Plagiarism regulations
Many people who use AI do not expect that they will end up being guilty of breaking the third of these rules—plagiarism. Ultimately, trying to pass off AI-written content as your own is, in essence, plagiarism—even if no real human wrote it. Also, even with a generally outstanding record as far as AI tools go, Claude has also faced allegations of copyright infringement.
Can Claude be Detected by AI Detectors?
As AI models rapidly evolve, AI detection tools are also getting better.
As time has gone on, cases of cheating in school using AI have skyrocketed. However, we also know that it’s within our power to detect AI-generated content accurately.
In practice, Claude-generated content is detectable by AI detectors. Some characteristics of AI writing that are common across the industry often occur when using Claude. Overly dramatic fictional writing, repetitive phrasing, and conservative and often apologetic sentences may be signs. There’s also the simple “unnatural” factor that often comes up.
The thing is that you may be able to detect AI content with your own eyes. But you can use an AI detector to make sure you don’t miss a telltale sign.
AI Detector instantly scans content for authenticity. Our scanner can detect patterns that AI generation tools leave behind. The scanner also detects plagiarism or unfactual information. If you’re concerned that some work you’ve seen was generated by Claude or other AI programs, try our AI content detector for free.
How to Use Claude – The Right Way
Overall, it isn’t too hard to use Claude or other AI tools in a way that keeps your AI content accurate, ethical, and legal. If you’re confused about anything, Claude will tell you directly how you can use their tools the right way.
A big part of Claude’s success has come from how Anthropic has positioned its brand. Claude’s content follows stricter and more thorough rules than those of most of its alternatives. This is what has led to its high scores when it’s been scrutinized academically.
However, for more reasons than just those we’ve gone over, it’s best not to use such a powerful tool as a shortcut for writing assignments, whether at school or elsewhere. Claude can provide you with organizational assistance, inspiration, and even help you formulate some of the most coherent arguments possible. But it’s your responsibility to take ownership of anything you present as your own. That means not passing off AI-generated content as your own or failing to fact-check what Claude or other AI tools give you.
