Claude 2.1: Anthropic’s ChatGPT Rival Gets New Killer Feature

As OpenAI hits the headlines for all the wrong reasons, Anthropic has turned Claude into an "industry-leading" AI tool.

Amid the chaos that has engulfed ChatGPT creators OpenAI over the last few days – which has led to CEO Sam Altman being fired and then quickly reinstated to his position – one of its direct competitors, Anthropic, has upgraded the language model powering its chatbot, Claude AI.

Claude 2.1 delivers “advancements in key capabilities for enterprises” and now includes a 200K context window, which is bigger than the context window offered by GPT-4 Turbo and the largest context window offered by a publicly available AI tool. Adjustments have also been made to ensure Claude 2.1 doesn't hallucinate as much as its sister models.

Here's what you really need to know about Antrophic's Claude 2.1 AI release, including the latest features, pricing and how to start using it today.

Claude 2.1: A New AI Industry Leader?

Anthropic has launched Claude 2.1, its latest and most advanced language model. By far the biggest and most noteworthy difference between Claude 2, which launched earlier this year, and Claude 2.1 is the amount of information that can be relayed to Claude via its message box.

Previously 128,000 tokens, Claude’s context window has now been enlarged to 200,000 tokens.

That’s around 150,000 words, or 500 pages of material – roughly equivalent to one cover-to-cover copy of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre.

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Anthropic says that Claude 2.1 will be able to “summarize, perform Q&A, forecast trends, compare and contrast multiple documents, and much more” and expects the latency to “decrease substantially” as the technology develops.

Claude 2.1 New Features and How to Use It Right Now

The other big change to Claude is a decrease in hallucinations – Anthropic says that Claude 2.1 is half as likely to serve users false statements as its predecessor, Claude 2.0.

Graphic showing claude errors

Image: Anthropic

Significant improvements have also been made to the chatbot’s ability to respond with correct answers to queries related to long-form documents, such as legal filings and financial reports.

Anthropic says that, when tasked with analyzing large documents and files “Claude 2.1 demonstrated a 30% reduction in incorrect answers and a 3-4x lower rate of mistakenly concluding a document supports a particular claim.”

Other changes include the introduction of system prompts – users can now specify instructions about how they want Claude to act, similar to how you can currently prompt ChatGPT. With system prompts, Claude is less likely to break out of character.

You can sign up and use Claude for free via Anthropic's website, where you can also view the price of token bundles you can use to talk to the chatbot. Claude Pro, like ChatGPT Plus, costs $20 per month and is geared toward power users with business use cases. Claude 2.1 powers all of Anthropic's options.

Claude Swoops as Chaos Continues at OpenAI

Claude 2.1 was launched this week amid major chaos at OpenAI, the company who owns ChatGPT that’s been bankrolled by Microsoft for the last few years.

First, CEO Sam Altman was sacked by OpenAI for failing to be “consistently candid” with the board. He was then hired by Microsoft to head up their AI team, only to be rehired by Open AI around 48 hours later.

It’s probably just a coincidence that Anthropic decided to launch a new version of Claude this week, but the latest installment in the generative AI arms race comes at an interesting time for its frontrunner.

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Written by:
Aaron Drapkin is a Lead Writer at Tech.co. He has been researching and writing about technology, politics, and society in print and online publications since graduating with a Philosophy degree from the University of Bristol five years ago. As a writer, Aaron takes a special interest in VPNs, cybersecurity, and project management software. He has been quoted in the Daily Mirror, Daily Express, The Daily Mail, Computer Weekly, Cybernews, and the Silicon Republic speaking on various privacy and cybersecurity issues, and has articles published in Wired, Vice, Metro, ProPrivacy, The Week, and Politics.co.uk covering a wide range of topics.
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