San-Francisco-based AI lab Anthropic has announced Claude 2, a new ChatGPT rival open to the public in the US and the UK. The model is the latest version of ‘Claude’ released merely five months ago which was available only to businesses. Unlike its predecessor the latest version is available via a public-facing beta site as well as an API. 

One of the chatbot’s beta testers, Ethan Mollick, an Associate Professor at the Wharton School of the University said in a LinkedIn post, it has two big advantages over the other models: it is very good at handling documents (especially PDFs, which GPT struggles with) and shows a very sophisticated “understanding” of documents. Furthermore, it continues to be the most “pleasant” AI personality. On the downside, he suggested users to refrain from using the model for data, even though it accepts CSV files. It hallucinates answers, contrarily Code Interpreter does not.

The startup run by former senior members of the OpenAI team Daniela and Dario Amodei purports to be a more ethically-driven company that makes generative AI safe and “steerable,” according to its website.

According to the announcement blog, the latest version of the AI assistant scored 76.5 percent on the multiple choice section of the Bar exam and in the 90th percentile on the reading and writing portion of the GRE. Its coding skills have notably improved, scoring 71.2 percent on a Python coding test compared to Claude’s 56 percent.

Earlier this year, in February, Anthropic introduced a waitlist for early access to Claude, following IT giant Google’s recent investment in the startup. The investment—worth $300 million—gave Google a 10% stake in the company bringing Anthropic’s value at approximately $5 billion. The partnership was predicted, as earlier in January Anthropic announced that it had chosen Google Cloud as its preferred cloud provider.

The OpenAI competitor has set itself apart with its focus on understanding and developing safe AI systems, with the “constitutional AI” approach. “We have an internal red-teaming evaluation that scores our models on a large representative set of harmful prompts, using an automated test while we also regularly check the results manually,” said the blog. This is to ensure that Claude 2 is less susceptible to jailbreaks or nefarious uses.

If you’re in the US or UK, you can access the AI chatbot through the Claude 2 page, and sign up for free. Click on “Talk to Claude”, provide an email address and you’ll be ready to go.