Anthropic, created by ex-OpenAI executives, has improved its faster, cheaper text-generating model, Claude Instant, available through an API.
Anthropic says Claude Instant 1.2, which integrates the qualities of Claude 2, shows “significant” gains in math, coding, reasoning, and safety. Claude Instant 1.2 scored 58.7% on a coding benchmark and 86.7% on math problems in internal testing, compared to 52.8% and 80.9%, respectively.
Anthropic blogged that Claude Instant delivers longer, more structured responses and follows formatting requirements better. In addition, Instant 1.2 improves quote extraction, multilingual capabilities, and question answering.
Anthropic says Claude Instant 1.2 is less prone to hallucinate and harder to jailbreak. “Hallucination” occurs when a huge language model like Claude outputs wrong or incomprehensible text, while jailbreaking is a method that bypasses the authors’ safety precautions with cleverly-written prompts.
The context window in Claude Instant 1.2 is 100,000 tokens, same in Claude 2. The model examines context window content before generating further text, whereas tokens are raw text (e.g., “fantastic” would be split into “fan,” “tas” and “tic”). Claude Instant 1.2 and 2 can analyze 75,000 words, comparable to “The Great Gatsby.”
Large context windows reduce the likelihood of models “forgetting” previous discussions.
Anthropic intends to construct a “next-gen algorithm for AI self-teaching,” as it states in its investor pitch deck. Such an algorithm might be used to make virtual assistants that answer emails, study, and create art, literature, and more, as GPT-4 and other huge language models have shown.
This algorithm is not Claude Instant. It’s meant to compete with OpenAI’s entry-level products and businesses like Cohere and AI21 Labs, which are creating and selling text- and image-generating AI systems.
The 2021 startup Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI VP of research Dario Amodei, has raised $1.45 billion at a single-digit valuation. That sounds like a lot, but the company predicts it’ll need $5 billion over two years to build its chatbot.
Anthropic claims “thousands” of customers and partners, including Quora, which offers Claude and Claude Instant through Poe, a subscription-based generative AI platform. Claude drives DuckDuckGo’s new DuckAssist product, which answers simple search inquiries with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Claude is also part of Notion AI’s technical backend, an AI writing assistance embedded into the workplace.
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