Anthropic, the AI safety startup founded in 2021, has announced the release of Claude 2.1 – an update to their conversational AI assistant that significantly expands its context window to 200,000 tokens. This represents a major leap forward in Claude’s ability to follow long-form conversations and reason about complex topics.
What is Claude?
Claude is an AI assistant created by Anthropic to be helpful, harmless, and honest. It’s designed to converse naturally using machine learning techniques like self-supervised learning while also aligning with human values through a technique Anthropic calls Constitutional AI.
Some key capabilities of Claude include:
- Natural language conversations on nearly any topic
- Retrieving knowledge from the internet to provide helpful information
- Admitting when it doesn’t know something or makes a mistake
- Rejecting inappropriate requests and steering conversations to positive ends
Claude is currently available as an API for companies and developers to build conversational interfaces. Anthropic also offers a Claude assistant for individual users to chat with.
The Significance of a 200K Context Window
Up until now, Claude’s context window – the amount of conversational history it can take into account – has been limited to approximately 10,000 tokens. With Claude 2.1, this expands to 200,000 tokens.
Why does this matter?
A larger context window allows Claude AI to follow long-form conversations for hours without losing track of the context or dropping details. Many real human conversations cover a wide range of topics and references that require a broad understanding of previous statements.
A 200K context also enables much more sophisticated reasoning, argument tracking, and explanation of Claude’s own thoughts. With more context to work with, Claude can elaborate on concepts that were introduced much earlier in the conversation rather than forgetting details or changing the subject.
Finally, a large context window helps Claude achieve more consistent personality, preferences, and beliefs. Without enough context, AI assistants project different perspectives at different times that can seem fickle or unintelligent. A 200K context window provides enough continuity for Claude to form coherent, stable views.
How Anthropic Achieved This Breakthrough
Expanding Claude’s context window 10x from 10K to 200K tokens was no small feat from an engineering perspective. It required innovations in deep learning architecture, data processing, and inference compilation.
On the deep learning side, Claude 2.1 employs a modified Evolved Transformer architecture that can handle long sequences more efficiently than previous Transformer architectures like GPT-3. Data preprocessing techniques like dense Passage Retrieval are also leveraged to quickly identify relevant context.
Additionally, Anthropic developed methods to optimize inference compilation through heuristics and precomputation. This allows such a massive context window to be leveraged in real-time conversations rather than introducing lag. Anthropic calls the framework they created to enable this Constitutional Inference.
Of course, Claude 2.1’s integrity constraints, filtering techniques and steerability methods built on top of Constitutional AI are also compatible with the expanded 200K context. This prevents issues like hallucination or repetition over a longer context.
By combining all these technical innovations, Anthropic’s engineering team was able to not just increase Claude’s context window, but optimize performance for real-time usage.
Changes and Improvements in Claude 2.1
Beyond the 200K context capabilities, Claude 2.1 introduces additional changes both under the hood and for users.
Some highlights include:
- 15% reduction in toxic generations through safety improvement
- Faster response times for quicker back-and-forth conversations
- Enhanced classification and detail recall due to larger parameter count
- Expanded range of conversational topics, particularly complex issues
- Increased consistency of views, personality and preferences
- Richer storytelling, scenario exploration and hypotheticals
While expanding Claude’s context window was the banner achievement, refinements across capabilities also aim to provide a noticeably smoother, smarter conversational experience.
Use Cases for Claude 2.1’s Large Context
With Claude 2.1’s step change in context length, what new use cases open up?
A few opportunities include:
Long-Form Writing Assistant
Fiction authors, journalists, academics and other writers can utilize Claude as a conversational aid for long pieces requiring consistent narrative, character and themes. Claude can track complex storylines, timelines of real events, chains of logic/evidence etc over a full book or thesis.
Legal Assistant
Following lengthy case histories, legal proceedings, trial accounts and intricate contractual details is now in Claude’s wheelhouse. Legal teams can offload reading case law, identifying precedents and assessing credibility of witness accounts onto Claude.
Medical Assistant
Patient healthcare questions often require understanding medical history, previous treatments, chronic issues etc. Claude 2.1’s capacity to recall granular specifics hundreds of messages earlier can help diagnose issues, suggest medications/therapies and give holistic care advice.
Customer Support Avatar
Whether it’s technical support, sales, onboarding or other customer-facing scenarios, retaining context from past interactions builds rapport and resolve issues efficiently. Claude 2.1 enables persistent memory of customer profiles for consistent 24/7 service.
These are just a few possibilities – Claude API developers are finding many creative applications for long conversational context in real-world products and interfaces.
Availability of Claude 2.1 API
Claude 2.1 is now available via API for all current and new Anthropic customers. Signups begin on an interim Claude 2.0 basis before allocating quota for the 2.1 upgrade.
Free trials to experience Claude’s new 200K context capabilities are also offered. Developers can apply through Anthropic’s website for access.
Along with the API, Anthropic will release a desktop application for individual users to converse directly with Claude later this winter.
The Cutting Edge of Conversational AI
With innovations like Constitutional AI plus Claude’s new 200k token context window, Anthropic aims to set a new high bar for safe, trustworthy and intelligent conversational assistants. Claude 2.1 represents remarkable progress toward interfaces that can reason, relate and communicate like humans do.
Yet Anthropic also stresses that keeping apace of AI’s quickly evolving capabilities requires sustained research investment. Later this year, the nonprofit Anthropic Foundation plans to open new engineering labs focused on machine learning interpretability, probability and logic modeling, data compression, model extraction attacks and other fundamental problems.
Solving these complex challenges in the open alongside academic partners is key to Constitutional AI’s goal of ensuring not just Claude but all AI systems behave reliably. Combining cutting edge technology with proactive safety measures and transparency will enable Anthropic to raise the bar even higher with future Claude releases.
