Everyone loves Anthropic

Anthropic, an emerging AI research company, is gradually gaining widespread attention and love in the industry. Its uniqueness lies in its deep concern for AI ethics and safety, and its commitment to developing AI technologies that benefit society and respect human values. Anthropic's research team brings together many top talents, who have achieved remarkable results in fields such as natural language processing and machine learning. The company's mission is to promote the harmonious coexistence of AI and human society through technological innovation. Anthropic's values ​​and practices have not only won recognition from the industry, but also inspired the public's optimistic expectations for the future development of AI. With the continuous maturity and application of its technology, Anthropic is expected to lead AI to a more humane and sustainable future.

OpenAI’s “Game of Thrones” continues, with co-founder John Schulman leaving the company after nearly nine years at OpenAI to join competitor Anthropic.

John Schulman said that this move was not out of dissatisfaction with OpenAI, but to focus more on AI alignment research and return to the forefront of technology. He believes that Anthropic can provide new perspectives and research environment, which is more in line with his career development plan.

This is similar to the reasons given by Ilya Sutskever, chief scientist who previously left OpenAI, and Jan Leike, head of super alignment.

In addition, OpenAI product director Peter Deng also chose to resign, and President Greg Brockman will extend his vacation until the end of the year.

At this point, of OpenAI's 11 co-founders, only CEO Sam Altman, Wojciech Zaremba, and Greg Brockman, who is still on a long vacation, remain.

The departure of this senior executive has once again sparked discussions in the industry about the development of OpenAI. This is also the second time that an OpenAI executive has jumped to Anthropic after Jan Leike.

However, in stark contrast to OpenAI’s “turbulent” year, Anthropic has shown impressive momentum.

Not only has it attracted OpenAI talent to join, its latest products have also been widely praised by users.

In an increasingly competitive market, Anthropic has gradually attracted more attention with its unique corporate structure and product concept.

Although there is still a big gap with ChatGPT, Claude's traffic share has gradually increased in the past 6 months, especially in the recent period, showing a significant growth trend.

1. “Claude will be off work when his credit limit is used up”

Anthropic is an artificial intelligence startup founded in 2021, whose team includes several former OpenAI employees.

The company is led by sibling founders Dario and Daniela Amodei, who serve as CEO and president, respectively.

The two had previously held senior positions at OpenAI, but due to disagreements over the direction of OpenAI’s development, they left and founded Anthropic.

The two San Francisco-based companies have been in a fierce competition to develop the best AI models since Anthropic's founding.

Anthropic’s latest model is Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which sets new industry benchmarks in multiple areas, including graduate-level reasoning ability (GPQA test), undergraduate-level knowledge reserve (MMLU test), and programming skills (HumanEval test).

It performed well in multiple evaluations, outperforming competitor models while maintaining the speed and cost of the mid-range model, the Claude 3 Sonnet.

Sonnet 3.5 ranked first in the chatbot arena coding category.

Claude 3.5's powerful code generation capabilities are particularly well received. Many programmers say that they can no longer write code without the help of Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Recently, Y Combinator CEO forwarded an article praising Claude Sonnet 3.5 on X, which received more than 4 million views.

In the article, the author wrote that after using Claude Sonnet 3.5, work efficiency has been significantly improved, and the technical parts of most popular applications can be implemented 10 times faster than before.

While there are still architectural and infrastructure decisions that need to be made, things like UI components now function 10x faster, allowing iteration to be very fast.

His workflow is divided into three steps:

1. Think carefully about the features and discuss them with Claude;
2. Write a basic spec for the feature (usually just a few sentences and bullet points) and iterate with Claude.
3. Make sure to provide all relevant background for Claude and ask for implementation, (code)

The CEO of ottogrid.ai also said in a follow-up post that 50% of their code was written by Claude, and that this percentage will increase to 80% next year. He also said, "Don't use Claude 3.5 to write code? Be careful not to be left behind by teams like ours."

Since Claude was not available, I decided to just take a day off.

Claude will leave work when his quota is used up.

What’s even more exaggerated is that Erik Schluntz, an engineer at Anthropic, broke his right hand in a bicycle accident and could only type with his left hand. He used speech-to-text and Claude AI to continue working, and even wrote more than 3,000 lines of code in a week.

Erik Schluntz also wrote an article to share his experience. He believes that the application of AI in the field of software development is showing a rapid development trend. He predicts that in the next 1-3 years, AI engineers will become a reality and be able to work autonomously and collaboratively. By then, creativity will become the only bottleneck.

2. Artifact: Starting the AI ​​Interaction Revolution

It is worth mentioning that Claude also launched a new interactive method, Artifact, which allows users to run and debug code directly in the AI ​​dialogue interface.

The main features of Artifacts include real-time code execution, interactive operation, visual preview, and cross-platform sharing capabilities.

These features enable developers to quickly validate ideas, iterate prototypes, and easily demonstrate results.

Claude 3.5 Sonnet + Artifacts is a "game-changing product".

Artifacts provides developers with a more direct programming experience. Many developers say this feature opens up new possibilities for AI-assisted development and has the potential to change the current application development model.

At first glance, Artifacts might seem like just a nondescript update.

Just a dedicated workspace, alongside the chat interface, that lets users manipulate and optimize AI-generated content in real time.

But this seemingly simple new feature may become one of the most critical battlefields for AI in the next few years: the interactive interface.

Because a big challenge in AI is not only to create smarter AI, but also to make it easy to use, intuitive and seamlessly integrated into existing workflows.

This is also what makes Anthropic different from competitors such as OpenAI.

ChatGPT’s new voice feature is eye-catching, and Google emphasizes Gemini’s capabilities in knowledge acquisition and processing, but Anthropic is targeting a more fundamental question: How to transform AI from a fancy chatbot to a real partner?

By creating a space where AI-generated content can be easily edited, optimized, and incorporated into existing projects, Anthropic is attempting to bridge the gap between AI as a tool and AI as a team member.

This shift has the potential to revolutionize working practices across industries.

This also highlights the growing philosophical divide in AI development.

OpenAI and Google appear to be locked in an arms race of model capabilities, competing to build the biggest, smartest AI.

Anthropic, on the other hand, is playing a different game, focusing on usability and user experience.

In an industry often accused of chasing benchmarks over real-world applications, Anthropic’s focus on user experience may help it stand out.

As companies work to integrate AI into their operations, solutions that are not only smart enough but also offer intuitive interfaces and seamless workflow integration will have a decisive advantage.

As the capability gap between models narrows, building an ecosystem around models is key to retaining customers. Especially in the field of programming, Artifacts provides developers with a new and more efficient workflow.

Of course, Artifacts is still in its infancy, and competitors are not going to sit idly by. It is foreseeable that as other companies realize the importance of rethinking the user interface, a lot of innovation will emerge in this field.

Anthropic has a solid release, while OpenAI is often criticized for over-promotion

3. “What happened to OpenAI will not happen to us”

In OpenAI's previous "palace fighting" storm, the board of directors fired Sam Altman. The reason why this happened was due to the hidden dangers of OpenAI's corporate structure.

In OpenAI's structure, the company is governed by a nonprofit board of directors that is not accountable to the company's shareholders.

Anthropic is closer to a traditional company, with a board of directors that is accountable to shareholders. However, Anthropic also adopts a non-traditional corporate structure. It is not a limited liability company, but a public benefit company (PBC), which means that in addition to the fiduciary responsibility to increase shareholder profits, its board of directors also has legal space to ensure that "transformative AI contributes to the prosperity of humanity and society." In other words, if the board chooses to prioritize safety rather than increasing profits, it will be more difficult for shareholders to sue Anthropic's board of directors.

Anthropic has long prided itself on its unique corporate structure, which it sees as different from OpenAI.

Anthropic also emphasized to the media that what happened to OpenAI would not happen to Anthropic.

Yet Anthropic’s structure is essentially an experimental design, and Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman, who served as an outside adviser to Anthropic as it developed its early governance structure, said even the best design in the world sometimes doesn’t work.

But he has high hopes for Anthropic's success.

In addition to the company structure, another major difference between OpenAI and Anthropic is the use of a structured approach to ensure that the behavior of AI systems meets specific ethical standards and codes of conduct, which is an important feature of Anthropic.

Anthropic pays more attention to the security and controllability of artificial intelligence, and is committed to developing explainable, reviewable, and guideable AI to ensure that artificial intelligence can serve humanity.

Therefore, Anthropic used a method called "Constitutional AI" (CAI) when training Claude, which is different from OpenAI's GPT model training method.

By giving Claude a set of guidelines or "constitutions," they are introduced at the early stages of model training, rather than just for screening after the answers are generated. These principles cover a wide range of areas from ethics to data privacy, with the goal of allowing AI systems to make decisions and generate content in accordance with these principles.

However, this commitment also brings greater challenges. Although Anthropic adheres to its unique corporate structure and mission, it still needs to deal with the dual challenges of external pressure and internal balance in the real world business environment.

In the past year, Anthropic has raised more than $7 billion, mostly from tech giants like Amazon and Google. These companies, along with Microsoft and Meta, are vying to dominate the field of AI. In the future, Anthropic will need more financial support. It must continue to launch better products and show huge profit prospects to meet investors' expectations in order to obtain the huge funds needed to build top models.

On the other hand, if Anthropic can maintain its current trend of being more robust than OpenAI, the company may be able to open up a new path - one in which AI can develop safely, free from the harsh pressures of the market, and bring benefits to society as a whole.