The rapid advancement of conversational AI has led to the emergence of two intriguing new chatbots in recent months: Claude, developed by AI safety startup Anthropic, and Bard, announced by search giant Google. While both aim to engage humans in open-ended dialogue, Claude and Bard represent divergent approaches to the challenge of creating safe and capable AI assistants. In this article, we‘ll dive deep into the key differences between these two systems, examining everything from their computational architectures to their commercial prospects.
Distinct Origins and Philosophies
Claude and Bard may have similar conversational abilities at first glance, but the two chatbots arose from very different contexts. Anthropic is a mission-driven startup dedicated to developing safe and ethical AI systems, with a particular focus on AI alignment – getting AI to behave in accordance with human values. This priority is clearly reflected in Claude, which was trained using "constitutional AI" techniques designed to constrain the model to be helpful, honest, and harmless.
Google, on the other hand, is a massive tech company with a core business in web search and online advertising. While Google has invested heavily in fundamental AI research and development, its projects like Bard are ultimately driven by the goal of enhancing its lucrative suite of products. With Bard, Google aims to augment its search results with AI-generated answers and content, potentially increasing user engagement and creating new avenues for ads and monetization.
These distinct origins and incentives manifest in some philosophical differences between Claude and Bard. Anthropic has been transparent about its focus on AI safety, even publishing research papers detailing its approach. Google, in contrast, has revealed little about Bard‘s training process or safeguards, leading to concerns about potential negative impacts. Fundamentally, Anthropic‘s goal with Claude is to prove the feasibility of safe and beneficial AI assistants, while Google‘s objective for Bard is to maintain its market dominance by staying at the cutting edge of AI.
Capability and Performance Variations
Based on early testing and limited public interaction, Claude and Bard both display impressive language understanding and generation skills. They can engage in freeform conversation, answer questions, help with analysis and writing tasks, and even write code. However, there appear to be some notable variations in their current capabilities and relative strengths.
Claude has garnered praise for its ability to engage in open-ended dialogue while largely avoiding harmful, false, or nonsensical statements. Guided by its constitutional AI training, Claude works hard to interpret a query, give direct and concise responses, and admit what it doesn‘t know. Users have found Claude to be a pleasant conversational companion that can even understand context and subtext. At the same time, Claude will push back on improper requests and aim to be objective.
Initial impressions of Bard, in contrast, have highlighted some factual errors and instances of making up information, likely reflecting the challenges of extracting reliable knowledge from the entirety of the web. Bard also seems to take a more verbose, neutral tone in its responses rather than picking up on user cues. However, Google has touted Bard‘s ability to distill complex subjects, providing high-level explanations and insights. As it has not been released, Bard‘s full scope of capability remains to be seen.
Both Claude and Bard represent significant advancements in language AI, but their performance strengths may differ. Claude appears optimized for truthful back-and-forth dialogue, while Bard may be better suited to summarizing and explaining topics. As they develop, each chatbot‘s specialization will become clearer.
Public Access and Availability
Another key distinction between Claude and Bard is their level of public availability. Anthropic has taken a measured approach, gradually opening up Claude to users via a waitlist over the past year. Access is currently free for limited conversation volumes, with a paid tier of $20/mo for heavier users. This has allowed Anthropic to stress test Claude and gather valuable feedback while maintaining control. They‘ve also released an API for developers to build custom applications on top of Claude.
Bard, on the other hand, remains an internal Google project with no concrete timeline for public release. Google initially opened it only to a group of trusted testers, and has not yet detailed plans for wider availability. This could reflect caution after some public blunders, a desire to refine the model further, or a strategy to tie Bard to existing Google products. But the lack of a hands-on Bard experience for regular users makes it difficult to fully assess its potential impact.
Divergent Business Models
The commercial approaches of Anthropic and Google with their respective chatbots also differ substantially. Anthropic appears to be pursuing a straightforward software-as-a-service model, providing API access to Claude for a subscription fee. This could allow them to directly monetize the technology while maintaining tight control over usage and behavior. However, some have speculated that the free access to Claude could just be a way to gather data and feedback before pursuing other business avenues.
Google‘s plans for Bard are more complex, as the chatbot is meant to be deeply integrated with the company‘s existing products and business model. Rather than directly charging for access, Bard is likely to indirectly generate revenue by driving increased usage of Search, Ads, and other Google services. The chatbot could become a key differentiator for Google as it competes with emerging threats like Microsoft‘s ChatGPT integration into Bing. But there are open questions about how generative AI chatbots like Bard will coexist with Google‘s core search ads cash cow.
Computational Foundations
Though the full technical details of Claude and Bard‘s underlying architectures are not public, there are some known variations in how they were built. Claude is based on Anthropic‘s proprietary Reliable and Efficient Learning Infrastructure (RELITE) architecture, which is specialized for language models using text corpora. It utilizes Reinforcement Learning from Feedback (RLF) to tailor its outputs to human preferences.
Bard, on the other hand, uses Google‘s Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA), a large family of Transformer-based language models trained on a massive web corpus. While similar to chatbots like GPT in structure, LaMDA is augmented with multi-task prompts allowing it to perform search-like functions and answer questions. But Google has had difficulties fine-tuning LaMDA for natural interaction while still maintaining coherence and correctness.
Both chatbots are pushing the boundaries of language model architectures and performance. But Claude may have an edge in terms of leveraging efficient, safety-first frameworks, while Bard has access to more raw horsepower and web data. As with many emerging technologies, the ultimate success or failure may come down more to design choices and use case than pure computational capability.
Privacy, Safety and User Control
The debut of powerful AI chatbots like Claude and Bard raises important questions about data privacy, usage, and user control. Here too the two systems display some contrasts. Anthropic has made AI safety a core part of its mission and development process. With Claude, they pledge not to store conversations without user permission, and give users control over their data. The constitutional AI techniques aim to keep Claude well-behaved even in unfamiliar situations.
Google has a more mixed track record on data privacy and usage, given its surveillance advertising business model. There are open concerns about how conversation data from Bard might be exploited for user profiling and ad targeting. And Google has provided less detail on the safeguards in place to keep Bard from behaving harmfully or deceitfully. As a general purpose system plugged into Google‘s vast data troves, Bard presents more unknowns. While still early, Anthropic‘s Claude seems to hold an edge in responsible development and deployment, likely a result of the company‘s founding mission. User trust and control will be key to success and adoption of chatbot technologies.
Interaction Scope and Specialization
While Claude and Bard can both engage in open-ended conversation, their ideal interaction scope may vary. Claude has been actively developed and refined as a generalist AI assistant – it aims to be a useful aid for any casual conversation or task. Through feedback and iteration, Claude is being optimized as a friendly collaborator that can engage on any topic while adhering to boundaries.
Google envisions a somewhat more specialized role for Bard, focusing on its ability to synthesize and explain information to augment search queries. While it can engage in freeform dialogue, Bard‘s primary purpose is to provide direct answers and insights in response to questions. This may mean Bard is less personable or multifaceted than Claude, but more targeted as an authoritative knowledge base.
Ultimately, both chatbots aim to interact with humans via natural language. But Claude may be better suited to building relationships and freeform exploration, while Bard may be stronger for information retrieval and analysis. The scope and specialization will likely evolve as the technologies mature.
Development Trajectory and Ecosystem
As the younger entrant, Bard may be at a disadvantage compared to Claude in terms of development trajectory and progress. Anthropic has been iterating on Claude for over a year, gathering feedback from real users to refine its performance. This has allowed substantive improvements to Claude‘s coherence, knowledge, and robustness, as well as expansions to its underlying datasets.
Bard is still an early-stage project within Google, without the benefit of large-scale deployment and testing. Its announcement seemed to be prompted by competitive pressure rather than readiness for prime time. Google will need to move quickly to close the gap and prove that Bard can deliver comparable or superior performance to Claude or other chatbots.
Beyond the core models, Anthropic has been fostering a developer ecosystem around Claude, providing API access and documentation to extend its capabilities. While Google has vast resources, it‘s unclear whether it will pursue a similar path of enabling an open ecosystem around Bard. The success of both chatbots may hinge on the strength of their respective development communities.
Branding and Market Positioning
A final key distinction between Claude and Bard is how they are being positioned and branded. Anthropic has introduced Claude as a standalone AI assistant, with its own distinct identity. This allows Claude to develop brand equity and awareness separate from Anthropic‘s broader work. Anthropic can position Claude as a cutting-edge but safe and friendly AI companion.
Google, on the other hand, looks to be subsuming Bard within its existing portfolio of products, particularly Search. Rather than a distinct brand, Bard may simply become a feature or capability of Google‘s tools, albeit a potentially transformative one. Google will have to convince users that Bard represents entirely new value beyond its current core offerings.
While technical capability remains paramount, brand and market positioning will shape popular understanding and adoption of AI chatbots. Anthropic has an opportunity to define a new category with Claude as the exemplar of safe and beneficial AI assistants. But Google‘s enormous reach and resources allow it to roll out Bard to billions of users, setting the mainstream perception.
Looking Ahead to the Chatbot Future
The juxtaposition of Claude and Bard foreshadows the coming era of ubiquitous AI chatbots as an interface for information and interaction. The two systems embody differing visions for how these AIs should be developed and deployed. Anthropic‘s Claude is the vanguard of an open but carefully constrained AI assistant that can be safely adapted to myriad uses. Google‘s Bard represents the potential for chatbots to quickly scale into existing popular channels and shape large volumes of interactions.
Examining the similarities and differences between these two cutting-edge chatbots provides a glimpse into the key debates and decisions that will guide the future of conversational AI. And while much remains uncertain, it‘s clear that striking the right balance of capability, safety, and control will be essential to realizing the extraordinary potential of AI-driven dialogue. With both Anthropic and Google, and a range of other institutions, pushing the boundaries of language AI, Claude and Bard are just the first entries in a race that will fundamentally reshape how humans and computers communicate.
