OpenAI rival Anthropic makes its Claude chatbot even more useful

As OpenAI finds itself in the midst of an existential crisis, there’s a new chatbot update from Anthropic, the Google-backed AI startup founded by former OpenAI engineers that left disagreements over the company’s increasingly commercial direction as it its partnership with Microsoft advanced.

Anthropo has announced than the latest update of your chatbot, claudio 2.1, it can digest up to 200,000 tokens at a time for Pro level users, which is equivalent to over 500 pages of material.

The company also says that Claude will hallucinate (or lie) half as often as before and can do things like search the web or use a calculator through customizable tools. The chatbot now also supports persistent and custom prompts and has a new test window to test prompts.

The 200,000 token feature doubles what Claude could handle before, and is a significantly higher limit than the 32,000 token limit of the more expensive version of GPT-4. Anthropic calls this an “industry first” and says it allows the chatbot to pore over loads of entire code bases or function as the “Iliad.” The largest number of tokens is exclusive to the company’s Pro plan.

Anthropic also brought Claude a little closer to ChatGPT with the new beta tool usage feature. Users can now connect API tools and Claude will choose the best one for the job based on the context. That includes using a calculator or searching the web, and the company says users can request specific API calls using natural language.

Finally, the company said it updated its developer console with a test window to test new prompts and added the ability to give Claude custom persistent prompts. As with GPT-4, this means you can customize the chatbot to respond in specific ways or with specific personalities.