Google-backed Anthropic launched AI assistant Claude as an apparent rival to popular conversational platform ChatGPT, as the latter’s parent company OpenAI unveiled an upgraded language model for its products.

In its statement, Anthropic explained after completing testing it is making Claude available more widely, with the platform able to execute a variety of conversational and text processing tasks through either its own interface or APIs in its developer console.

Anthropic claims its service can aid with providing summaries, search, creative writing, Q&A and coding, among other use cases.

It also can apparently “take direction on personality, tone, and behaviour”.

Alongside the main product, Anthropic also developed a toned-down, cheaper but faster version branded Claude Instant.

While Anthropic is backed by Google, the tech giant also has its own so-called “experimental AI service” going under the name Bard, which was opened up for test by third parties last month.

There are also various other generative AI specialist and general systems already on the market or in development, though ChatGPT has attracted most of the headlines in this nascent space.

Amplifying chat
As Claude was being officially unveiled, ChatGPT parent OpenAI, which is backed by Microsoft, unveiled the first version of its latest AI model, GPT-4.

OpenAI claimed the release is 82 per cent less likely to respond to requests for “disallowed content” and 40 per cent more likely to produce factual responses than previous iteration, GPT-3.5.

It noted GPT-4 was a “large multimodal model (accepting image and text inputs, emitting text outputs) that, while less capable than humans in many real-world scenarios, exhibits human-level performance on various professional and academic benchmarks”.

A waiting list is in place for developers keen to get their hands on the new model.

Subscribers to its premium ChatGPT Plus service will also be able to access it, though with an initial usage cap.