Anthropic, the AI startup co-founded by former OpenAI employees, announced today announce Launch of its first premium consumer-facing subscription plan, Claude Pro, for Claude 2 – Anthropic’s text-analyzing, AI-powered chatbot.
For the monthly price of $20 in the US, or £18 in the UK, customers get “5x more usage” than Claude 2’s free tier, the ability to send “more” messages, and priority access to Claude 2 during Peak period. Traffic periods and early access to new features.
Claude Pro is priced the same as OpenAI’s ChatGPT Plus, OpenAI’s paid plan for ChatGPT – Claude 2’s competitor.
“Since its launch in July, users have told us they chose Cloud as their daily AI assistant because of longer context windows, faster outputs, complex reasoning capabilities and more,” Anthropic wrote in a post. Blog post. “Many also shared that they would appreciate more file uploads and conversations over longer periods… With Claude Pro, subscribers can now benefit from 5x the usage of our latest model.”
Anthropic says Claude Pro users can expect to send at least 100 messages to Claude 2 every eight hours, when the message limit is reset. (This is against the 50 messages per three-hour limit imposed on ChatGPT Plus subscribers.) Why this limit? Constrained capacity, explains the Anthropist in A Support document:
“Running a model as capable as Claude 2 requires a lot of powerful computers, especially when responding to large attachments and long conversations. We set these limits to ensure that Claude can be available for many people to try for free, while allowing power users to integrate Claude into their daily workflow.
From Anthropic’s perspective, hosting AI chatbots like Claude 2 is already expensive. At one time, so was OpenAI It said He paid $700,000 a day — or about $21 million a month — to run ChatGPT.
Claude 2’s message limit is consumed faster with longer conversations, especially with large attachments. For example, if a Claude Pro subscriber downloads a copy of “The Great Gatsby,” he or she will only be able to send about 20 subsequent messages over the next eight-hour period. This is because Cloud 2 “rereads” the entire conversation – including attachments – every time it receives a message.
As previously mentioned, Anthropic’s ultimate ambition is to create a “next-generation self-learning algorithm for AI,” as it describes it in a recent investor presentation. Such an algorithm could be used to build virtual assistants that can answer emails, conduct research, create works of art, books, and much more — some of which we’ve already tasted with the likes of GPT-4 and other big language models.
To date, Anthropic, which launched in 2021 and is led by former VP of research at OpenAI Dario Amodei, has raised $1.45 billion at a single-digit valuation in the billions. While that may seem like a lot, it’s far less than what the company estimates it will need — $5 billion over the next two years — to create the envisioned AI.
Most of the cash, including revenue from products like Claude Pro, will go toward computing power. The group’s Anthropic notes that it relies on clusters with “tens of thousands of GPUs” to train its models, and that it will require nearly $1 billion to spend on infrastructure in the next 18 months alone.