ChatGPT rival Anthropic upgrades chatbots 3 months after Amazon’s $3B investment

Anthropic, an AI firm partly owned by Amazon, announced on Thursday its second chatbot upgrade in four months, shifting from Claude 3 to Claude 3.5. This development comes as Anthropic strives to maintain its competitive edge against OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

The U.S.-based company, which received a $4 billion investment from Amazon, stated that the new upgrade will make its chatbot twice as fast. Anthropic reports that its chatbots serve millions of users for various purposes, from coding to customer service.

Michael Gerstenhaber, Anthropic’s head of product design, emphasized the new model’s advancements. Speaking to Agence France-Presse (AFP), Gerstenhaber highlighted Claude 3.5’s enhanced “ability to carry out tasks of very high complexity.”

He noted that the latest version has significantly improved customer support, creative writing, and aiding data scientists with visual processing.

Since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, OpenAI has led the market, capturing public interest with a bot capable of generating complex texts from simple prompts. In contrast, Anthropic has taken a more cautious approach, focusing on slower releases and stricter guardrails to prevent misuse.

The chatbot industry has faced numerous challenges, including high-profile errors such as Google Gemini’s controversial generation of images depicting black and Asian Nazi soldiers.

Additionally, AI firms have been criticized for their bots’ propensity to generate false statements and the opacity surrounding their data sources.

Legal and regulatory issues also loom over the industry. Musicians and other creatives have filed lawsuits against companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, accusing them of using copyrighted material without permission to train their models.

Furthermore, regulators in the US and other regions scrutinize significant investments by major tech companies in smaller AI firms, including Amazon’s stake in Anthropic.