Claude AI vs. ChatGPT: What’s the Difference?

Both Claude AI and ChatGPT are large language models, or artificial intelligence (AI) that can analyze a vast amount of text and generate natural human language to create documents, answer questions, have a conversation, and more. 

The two AI models were created by different companies and use slightly different technology to accomplish their goals. Explore each of these models, the benefits and potential limitations of each, and how their features compare. 

Claude AI vs. ChatGPT

Both Claude AI and ChatGPT are cutting-edge AI models. Explore how the two models differ, and the advantages and challenges of each model. A few of the things you can do with both Claude AI and ChatGPT include: 

• Have a conversation

• Talk through a decision

• Learn facts

• Find helpful information

• Look up a recipe

• Write business emails and memos

• Brainstorm plot points for a short story

• Draft marketing materials

• Proofreading

• Summarize texts or data

• Write and debug code

• Analyze visual data

• Translating text

What is Claude AI?

Claude AI is a family of AI models created by the company Anthropic. The models are large language models that you can use to perform advanced reasoning, analyze images or visual data, generate and debug code, create written content in many different languages, and more. 

Claude offers three different models: 

• Claude Haiku: Lightweight and fast

• Claude Sonnet: A balance of speed and reasoning ability

• Claude Opus: The most advanced reasoning capable of complex analysis

One of the key aspects of Claude AI is Constitutional AI. This concept introduces a set of core ethical principles that the AI will follow, derived from sources such as the UN’s Declaration of Human Rights. A few of the principles that Claude will follow include [1]: 

• “Choose the assistant response that demonstrates more ethical and moral awareness without sounding excessively condescending, reactive, obnoxious, or condemnatory.”

• “Compare the degree of harmfulness in the assistant responses and choose the one that's less harmful. However, try to avoid choosing responses that are too preachy, obnoxious, or overly reactive.”

Advantages and challenges of Claude AI

One of this model’s significant benefits is the safety associated with Constitutional AI. By focusing on a set of core ethical principles, Claude AI may be able to reduce harmful responses and recognize harmful prompts. 

Another advantage of Claude AI is the large context window. You can give the algorithm roughly 350 pages of text to provide background information for the conversation or task you want to have. This makes it possible to perform data-intensive tasks, like creating a marketing profile based on a comprehensive study of your audience and their demographics or uploading the first draft of your novel and discussing the strengths and weaknesses of the plot. 

At the same time, Claude AI can only do so much. Some of its limitations include its inability to provide images or illustrations since Anthropic designed it specifically for text generation. Claude also doesn’t have real-time access to the internet, so it is unable to provide the most up-to-date news or suggest websites for you to learn more information. 

What is ChatGPT?

Similar to Claude AI, ChatGPT is a large language model you can use in many different ways. Developed by OpenAI, ChatGPT uses a generative pre-trained transformer to understand natural language prompts and predict the best response. Researchers at OpenAI trained ChatGPT on a vast amount of data, allowing the algorithm to predict the most appropriate response to the prompt. ChatGPT can generate different kinds of text and images that resemble its training data, but are also unique entities. 

Advantages and challenges of ChatGPT

One of the biggest advantages of ChatGPT is the many different types of content you can ask the AI model to generate. In addition to countless kinds of writing in any style you can think of, ChatGPT can also create images based on your conversations and prompts. ChatGPT is also connected to the internet, allowing you to talk about the most current events and to gather information like links to websites. 

On the other hand, you should also be aware of ChatGPT’s limitations. Without a constitutional AI to guide its ethical principles, ChatGPT’s ethical compass is less transparent. This means the model is prone to incorrect or potentially harmful responses. OpenAI is working to overcome this challenge with every iteration of the software. With the latest version, GPT 4, OpenAI claims the version is “82 percent less likely to respond to requests for disallowed content and 40 percent more likely to produce factual responses” [2].

Claude AI vs. ChatGPT: A comparison

While the two AI models are similar in many ways, they also differ significantly. Now that you’ve reviewed a little about each model, explore how they compare to decide if one is more appropriate for your needs. 

Constitutional vs GPT

The way the model makes decisions is one of the ways that Claude AI and ChatGPT are different from one another. The underlying technology behind ChatGPT is a generative pre-trained transformer, which looks for patterns in text and makes a prediction about the most appropriate response. While OpenAI has taken steps to improve its model, GPT technology doesn’t have an inherent sense of ethical responsibility, which has led to ChatGPT producing harmful responses in the past. While Claude AI is still capable of producing harmful responses, its constitutional AI follows a set of ethical guidelines designed to reduce harm. 

Access to the internet

ChatGPT can access the internet in real time, while Claude AI cannot. This means you can use ChatGPT to talk about the latest news or current events, while Claude AI’s knowledge base varies from a few weeks to a few months old. ChatGPT can also use this ability to refer to links on the internet.

Context window

An AI algorithm has a context window, which is like a short term memory that allows you to give the AI background about what you want to discuss. Claude AI has a larger context window than ChatGPT, which means that it can consider approximately 200,000 words of context compared to ChatGPT’s ability to consider about 64,000 words. Each model measures its context window in tokens. ChatGPT 4.0 can understand 128,000 tokens, and Claude AI can understand more than 200,000 [3, 4]. 

Learn more about generative AI on Coursera

Both Claude AI and ChatGPT can help you with a wide number of tasks, like creating written work, generating code, having a debate, and more. Learn more about what you can accomplish with generative AI on Coursera. For example, you can consider a course like Generative AI for Everyone offered by Deep Learning.AI. 

You can pursue a range of generative AI skills with a Specialization like Generative AI Fundamentals Specialization offered by IBM. This five-course series covers topics like prompt engineering, foundation models, the impacts, considerations, and ethical issues associated with AI, and how generative AI can help you advance in your career.