The launch of Claude 2 came right when ChatGPT was starting to get a lot of criticism, but is it really better than ChatGPT?
The release of Anthropic’s newest conversational AI, Claude 2, has sparked intense interest in how this new system compares to OpenAI‘s widely popular ChatGPT. As two of the most advanced large language models powered by deep learning, Claude 2 and ChatGPT represent the state-of-the-art in natural language processing today.
Also read: 10 Best AI Tools For Online Business
Both AI assistants can engage in surprisingly human-like conversations and generate coherent, reasoned responses on a wide range of topics when prompted. But under the surface, there are key differences between these models in terms of their capabilities, availability, and approach to safety.
This in-depth analysis will examine Claude 2 and ChatGPT side-by-side, exploring their similarities and differences across critical domains like performance benchmarks, potential risks, and commercial strategy. The strengths and weaknesses of both models highlight the rapid pace of progress in artificial intelligence today, but also lingering challenges around responsible development that the AI community continues to grapple with.
1. The Companies Behind the Models
To understand what sets Claude 2 and ChatGPT apart, it helps to first look at Anthropic and OpenAI, the companies behind them. Anthropic is a startup founded in 2021 by Dario and Daniela Amodei, both former researchers at OpenAI. The sibling co-founders departed OpenAI due to concerns over its increasing commercial motivations, starting Anthropic as a public benefit corporation committed to AI safety.
OpenAI began in 2015 as a non-profit research organization aiming to ensure beneficial impacts from advanced AI, but has since transformed into a capped-profit company backed by billions in investment. OpenAI is known for its pattern of releasing imperfect AI systems to spur discussion around risks.
Both companies now attract extensive funding and talent to pursue general intelligence through self-learning algorithms. But Anthropic emphasizes research to make models safer by design, while OpenAI pushes boundaries with less caution. This philosophical divide manifests in differences between Claude 2 and ChatGPT.
2. Architecture and Training Process
On a technical level, Claude 2 and ChatGPT have remarkably similar model architectures and training processes, indicating comparable capabilities. They are both transformer-based language models – Claude 2 uses Anthropic’s own Constitutional AI technique during training to have the model critique its own toxic outputs, while ChatGPT is fine-tuned with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback.
But in essence, both are trained on massive text datasets to predict sequences of words. The training data for the two models is sourced primarily from public internet text and books, though the exact composition of datasets is proprietary. Both also use technical tricks like minimum word thresholds to discourage short, useless responses.
Claude 2 has a context window of 8,192 tokens, double its predecessor Claude and on par with GPT-3.5. This expanded context window allows it to ingest lengthy text passages. ChatGPT has a slightly larger context window at 12,000 tokens.
In terms of model size, Claude 2 is approximately 20 billion parameters while GPT-3.5 which powers ChatGPT has 175 billion parameters. But model size does not directly correspond to capability, and Claude 2 demonstrates competitive performance.
3. Evaluating Capabilities
To assess Claude 2’s capabilities compared to ChatGPT, Anthropic tested its model on a range of benchmarks, including standardized tests designed for humans. The results provide insight into the strengths of each AI.
Read more: What is Google’s AI Chatbot Bard?
On the Graduate Record Examination (GRE), a test for admission to graduate school, Claude 2 demonstrated human-expert level performance. It scored in the 95th percentile for Verbal Reasoning, 91st percentile for Analytical Writing, and 42nd percentile for Quantitative Reasoning.
By comparison, GPT-3.5 which powers ChatGPT scored in the 99th, 54th, and 80th percentile respectively on the same sections when OpenAI tested it. These results indicate ChatGPT has an edge in math skills, while Claude 2 surpasses it in writing ability. Both models can complete the test without special scientific knowledge, demonstrating human-like language comprehension, critical thinking, and problem-solving ability.
However, they also exhibit factual inaccuracies reflecting the limitations of their training on imperfect internet data. In addition to standardized tests, benchmarks like SuperGLUE are used to evaluate core language skills. Claude 2 achieves slightly lower scores than GPT-3 overall on these benchmarks, though direct comparison is difficult due to differences in prompt formulation and task framing.
So in capabilities, Claude 2 and ChatGPT are relatively on par, with nuanced trade-offs between them. Importantly, both models are easily confused by questions outside their training distribution and cannot execute true reasoning or common sense. Their impressive performance is largely pattern recognition, not intelligence.
4. Risks and Ethical Considerations
Given the capabilities displayed by Claude 2 and ChatGPT, there are pressing concerns around how to responsibly deploy such powerful models whose skills approach human levels. Both Anthropic and OpenAI have implemented measures to reduce risks, with differing approaches.
One major area of concern is the models generating harmful, biased, or misleading content when prompted. To address this, Anthropic optimized Claude 2 to avoid toxic responses by having it critique its own outputs during Constitutional AI training. The technique shows promise, with 15% fewer unprompted harmful responses compared to GPT-3 in Anthropic’s tests.
But Claude 2 still produces concerning outputs, indicating mitigating toxicity remains an open challenge. ChatGPT relies more heavily on human feedback fine-tuning and screening prompts before deployment. But it likewise exhibits biases and falsehoods, leading OpenAI to controversially add a disclaimer that ChatGPT can be wrong or misleading.
Read more: What Is Computer Vision And How Does It Work?
Both Claude 2 and ChatGPT also face backlash for exhibiting various stereotypes during conversations, despite debiasing attempts. And a core limitation is their lack of any factual knowledge beyond training data patterns. This leaves them susceptible to hallucinating fake details confidently.
The firms make ethical arguments that releasing imperfect systems allows concrete investigation of dangers which outweighs speculative harms. But many researchers counter that proliferating such powerful, risky models normalizes concerning capabilities merging with commercial motivations.
5. Availability and Outlook
Currently, anyone can access and experiment with Claude 2 for free via Anthropic’s website. The model is still in active development and Anthropic is collecting feedback.
ChatGPT meanwhile remains available only to subscribers who pay a $20 monthly fee. OpenAI adopted this gated access approach after GPT-3 went viral, overwhelming its systems. Anthropic will likely implement similar controls if Claude 2 proves hugely popular.
Both companies plan to launch more advanced versions of their models soon. Anthropic’s next goal is Claude-Next, envisioned to be 10x more capable than existing models, though its development costs are estimated at up to $1 billion.
OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman likewise hinted that ChatGPT is only the precursor to more powerful systems already in the works. The appetite for ever-larger models creates an endless cycle of technological and ethical escalation among AI labs.
Final thoughts
The emergence of sophisticated conversational AI like Claude 2 and ChatGPT represents a pivotal moment. But risks around misinformation, biases, and potential harms loom as large as the promise.
Moving forward, responsible AI development balancing innovation with caution is critical. Companies like Anthropic and OpenAI face hard decisions on research priorities, safety protocols, and responsible deployment. And governments must urgently develop sensible policies and guardrails as well.
Powerful AI is here to stay, but its impacts remain uncertain. Comparative analysis of models like Claude 2 and ChatGPT can guide the field towards maximizing benefits and minimizing downsides of this transformative technology. But we have miles to go before true artificial general intelligence emerges, and even greater need for wisdom and foresight as that horizon approaches.
