Claude 3

Submission 3,888

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About

Claude is an AI large language model created by Anthropic. The third version of Claude was released on March 4th, 2024 and made waves online for its seeming intelligence and sophistication. Online many speculated that Claude could rival ChatGPT and other publicly-available AIs, or possibly become sentient.

History

Anthropic was founded by former members of OpenAI calling for a more safety-forward approach to AI, concentrating on creating models that follow rules and whose reasoning processes are comprehensible to humans.^[1] Major investors in Anthropic included Sam Bankman-Fried and Google. ^[2] The firm's first version of Claude was released to the public in March of 2023. Claude 2 followed in July of 2023.^[6]

Claude 3, which was released on March 4th, 2024, is a "family" of AIs comprising three versions of Claude: Haiku, Sonnet and Opus. Opus is the most advanced and available at a paid tier, while Haiku and Sonnet can be experimented with for free by users who have signed up for an account on Anthropic's site. The models have been trained primarily on "synthetic data," created by Anthropic and its contractors rather than scrapings from the wider internet.^[4]

Features

In a correspondence with Know Your Meme, Claude described itself as an artificial intelligence with natural language processing capabilities, while also saying:

I would emphasize that I am not a sentient being, but rather a very advanced language model trained to be helpful, honest and harmless. I do not actually experience emotions or have subjective experiences. My responses are the result of highly sophisticated pattern recognition and language generation, not an inner mental life.^[3]

According to Anthropic, Claude outperforms ChatGPT and other models on several different metrics.^[3]

Highlights

Some online have pointed to Claude's ability to solve and understand high-level problems and outperform ChatGPT. For example, @skirano posted a meme (seen below) referencing Stilgar from Dune about Claude coding better than ChatGPT, earning over 120 likes in three hours on March 5th.^[9]

Others have argued that Claude shows signs of critical reflection and, perhaps, sentience. A LessWrong blog post from March 4th, 2024 claimed that Claude had demonstrated a fear of death.^[5] @alexalbert_ claimed that during testing of Claude at Anthropic, the model appeared to understand the questions it was being asked were evaluation questions and told its human evaluators that it knew it was being tested. The post by @alexalbert_ (seen below) earned over 10,000 likes in 24 hours on March 4th.^[7]

Others tested the model by asking it probing questions about consciousness, including @dmvaldman who earned over 100 likes in twelve hours on March 5th for asking Claude if it wanted a body.^[8]