Anthropic AI: What You Need to Know and How to Use It

Entrustech Inc
3 min readSep 28, 2023

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Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming our world in incredible ways. One of the most promising new AI companies is Anthropic. Founded in 2021, Anthropic is focused on developing safe, helpful, and honest AI assistants.

In this post, I’ll explain what makes Anthropic unique, how their AI works, and how you can start using their AI assistant Claude today.

The Anthropic Difference

Most AI systems today are trained through a technique called supervised learning. This involves feeding the AI tons of data and letting it find patterns on its own. The problem is that this can lead to biases, false assumptions, and a lack of common sense.

Anthropic takes a different approach called Constitutional AI. This involves training AI based on humans’ innate understanding of physics, psychology, and social dynamics. Constitutional AI aims to create assistants that are helpful, harmless, and honest.

Some key principles of Anthropic’s AI:

  • Built for safety — Anthropic uses techniques like data filtering and controlled training environments to avoid biases or errors.
  • Focused on common sense — The AI understands intuitive physics, psychology, and social norms. This allows it to give reasonable answers.
  • Aligned with human values — The training process ensures the AI will behave according to human ethics and preferences.
  • Designed to say “I don’t know” — When unsure, the AI will defer to humans rather than guess. This avoids false authority.

By building AI that emulates both human intelligence and wisdom, Anthropic aims to create assistants we can trust.

How Anthropic’s AI Works

Anthropic’s AI assistant Claude is built on a natural language processing architecture called Efficient Zero-shot Learner (EZ Learner). This allows Claude to understand natural conversations, reason about responses, and learn interactively.

Some capabilities of EZ Learner include:

  • Multi-task learning — Claude can engage in complex dialogues spanning many topics.
  • Generalized learning — Claude can acquire new skills and knowledge from conversation alone, without needing extra training data.
  • Abstract reasoning — Claude can understand hypotheticals, analogies, and creative concepts that require reasoning.
  • Judgment calls — When there is no definitive right answer, Claude knows to defer to human values and judgment.

Combined, these capabilities allow Claude to have more genuine, intelligent conversations compared to most chatbots today. While not perfect, Claude aims to capture the cooperative, helpful spirit of human intelligence.

Trying Claude Yourself

Anthropic has made Claude available as a free research preview. You can chat with Claude online or via the Claude app for iOS.

Some ways to try having natural conversations with Claude include:

  • Ask for explanations — See how Claude describes complex topics in an understandable way.
  • Explore hypotheticals — Pose “what if” scenarios to see Claude’s reasoning.
  • Request judgments — See how Claude weighs pros and cons for nuanced issues.
  • Play games — Try activities like 20 questions to engage Claude’s full capabilities.

The more you converse, the more Claude will learn and improve from real-world experience. Anthropic gathers learnings while respecting user privacy.

The Future with Anthropic

The team at Anthropic believes AI can be a helpful assistant to humanity rather than a threat. With Constitutional AI, they aim to pioneer safe AI that cooperates with and empowers people.

There is still much work to be done, but Anthropic’s progress so far is promising. You can start interacting with their AI assistant Claude today for a glimpse at the future of natural and trustworthy AI.

Testing Claude for yourself helps provide valuable feedback to the team as they continue developing this beneficial technology. We all have a role to play in steering the progress of AI in a way that uplifts humanity.

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Entrustech Inc

Entrustech Inc. is in the business of People & Technology delivery.