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Anthropic on Wednesday announced its first enterprise offering and a free iPhone app.
The generative artificial intelligence startup is the company behind Claude, one of the chatbots that, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and GoogleGemini, has exploded in popularity over the past year. Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI researchers, has backers including Google, Salesforce and Amazonand last year closed five different financing deals totaling about $7.3 billion.
The new plan for the business, called Team, has been in development for the past several quarters and includes beta testing with between 30 and 50 customers in industries such as technology, financial services, legal services and healthcare, Anthropic co-founder Daniela Amodei told CNBC in an interview, adding, that the idea for the service was partly born out of many of those same customers wanting a special enterprise product.
“So much of what we’ve heard from the corporate business is that people are already using Claude in the office,” Amodei said.
The team plan offers access to Anthropic’s three latest Claude models, with increased usage limits, administrative tools and billing management, and a longer “context window” meaning businesses can have “multi-step conversations” and upload long documents such as research papers and legal contracts for processing, according to Anthropic. Other coming features include “citations from trusted sources to verify AI-generated claims,” according to the release.
The team offering costs $30 per user per month when billed monthly. Requires a minimum of five users.
Anthropic app for iPhone
Anthropic’s first iOS app is free for users on all plans and is also available starting Wednesday. Provides synchronization with web chats and the ability to upload photos and files from a smartphone.
There are also plans to launch an Android app. “We actually just hired our first Android engineer, so we’re actively working on the Android app,” Amodei told CNBC, adding that the engineer starts next week.
The news about the team plan and the iOS app comes after more than a month Anthropic debuts Claude 3, a set of AI models said to be the fastest and most powerful yet. The new instruments are called Claude 3 Opus, Sonnet and Haiku.
The company said the most capable of the new models, the Claude 3 Opus, outperformed OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Google’s Gemini Ultra on industry benchmark tests such as undergraduate knowledge, higher-level reasoning and basic math. It’s also the first time Anthropic offers multimodal support: users can upload photos, charts, documents, and other types of unstructured data for analysis and answers.
The other models, the Sonnet and Haiku, are more compact and less expensive than the Opus. The company declined to say how long it took to train the Claude 3 or how much it cost, but said companies like Airtable and Asana helped A/B test the models. In an announcement Wednesday, Anthropic confirmed that other current customers using Claude include Pfizer, Asana, Zoom, Perplexity AI, Bridgewater Associates and others currently.
The generative AI field exploded last year with a record $29.1 billion invested in nearly 700 deals in 2023, a more than 260% increase in deal value from a year earlier, according to PitchBook. It’s become the buzziest phrase in corporate earnings conversations quarter after quarter. Scientists and ethicists have expressed considerable concern about the technology’s tendency to spread bias, yet it has quickly made its way into schools, online travel, the medical industry, online advertising, and more.
Around this time last year, Anthropic had completed Series A and B funding rounds, but had only released the first version of its chatbot without user access or much fanfare. It is now one of the hottest AI startups, with a product that competes directly with ChatGPT in both the enterprise and consumer worlds.
Claude 3 can summarize up to about 150,000 words, or a large book about the length range of Moby Dick or Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Its previous version could only summarize 75,000 words. Users can enter large data sets and request summaries in the form of a note, letter or story. ChatGPT, on the other hand, can handle about 3,000 words.
In January, OpenAI came under fire for its enterprise offering as it quietly dropped a ban on military use of ChatGPT and its other AI tools. Its policies still state that users should not “use our service to harm themselves or others,” including to “develop or use weapons.” Before the change, OpenAI’s policy page specified that the company did not allow the use of its models for “activity that has a high risk of physical harm, including: weapons development [and] army and war’.
Anthropic’s stance on Claude’s military use is similar to OpenAI’s updated policy.
“The way we draw the line today is we don’t discriminate based on industry or based on business, but we have an acceptable use policy that says what you can and can’t use Claude for,” Amodei told CNBC , adding, “Any business in the world that is not in a sanctioned country, of course, [and] meets basic business requirements, can use Claude for all kinds of back-office applications and things like that, but we have… very strict guidelines that Claude should not be used for weapons, basically anything that can cause violence or harm people.”
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/01/anthropic-iphone-ai-app-business-plan-to-compete-with-openai-announced.html
