Anthropic Launches Claude Pro, a Subscription AI That May Rival ChatGPT Plus

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Thursday, AI-maker and OpenAI competitor Anthropic launched Claude Pro, a subscription-based version of its Claude.ai web-based AI assistant, which functions similarly to ChatGPT. It's available for $20/month in the US or 18 pounds/month in the UK, and it promises five-times-higher usage limits, priority access to Claude during high-traffic periods, and early access to new features as they emerge. Like ChatGPT, Claude Pro can compose text, summarize, do analysis, solve logic puzzles, and more. Claude.ai is what Anthropic offers as its conversational interface for its Claude 2 AI language model, similar to how ChatGPT provides an application wrapper for the underlying models GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. In February, OpenAI chose a subscription route for ChatGPT Plus, which for $20 a month also gives early access to new features, but it also unlocks access to GPT-4, which is OpenAI's most powerful language model. What does Claude have that ChatGPT doesn't? One big difference is a 100,000 token context window, which means it can process about 75,000 words at once. Tokens are fragments of words used while processing text. That means Claude can analyze longer documents or hold longer conversations without losing its memory of the subject at hand. ChatGPT can only process about 8,000 tokens in GPT-4 mode. Anthropic's primary selling point for the Claude Pro subscription is "5x more usage," but the company doesn't clearly communicate what Claude's free-tier usage limits actually are. Dropping clues like cryptic breadcrumbs, the company has written a support document about the topic that says, "If your conversations are relatively short (approximately 200 English sentences, assuming your sentences are around 15-20 words), you can expect to send at least 100 messages every 8 hours, often more depending on Claude's current capacity. Over two thirds of all conversations on claude.ai (as of September 2023) have been within this length." In another somewhat cryptic statement, Anthropic writes, "If you upload a copy of The Great Gatsby, you may only be able to send 20 messages in that conversation within 8 hours." We're not attempting the math, but if you know the precise word count of F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic, it may be possible to glean Claude's actual limits. We reached out to Anthropic for clarification yesterday and have not received a response by press time.

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