AI startup Anthropic has announced that its chatbot, Claude, has expanded its context window from 9,000 to 100,000 tokens. This means that the AI language model behind Claude can now process much more information in one go (via The Verge).
For reference, the context window for OpenAI’s ChatGPT is roughly 3,000 words, while Microsoft’s Bing AI’s context window is 2,000 words.
It’s important to note that AI language models measure information in tokens, which are semantic units that don’t map precisely onto characters or words. Expanding the context window to 100,000 tokens means that users can input around 75,000 words into the chatbot at once.
“This means businesses can now submit hundreds of pages of materials for Claude to digest and analyze, and conversations with Claude can go on for hours or even days,” wrote Anthropic. As an example, the company loaded the entire text of The Great Gatsby into Claude and changed just one of the sentences from the whole text. Anthropic then asked Claude to spot the difference from the original text and the chatbot was able to respond with the correct answer in a whopping 22 seconds.
While Claude’s new capacity is currently only available to Anthropic’s business partners, the news shows that the capacity of AI language models to process information is increasing, which will in turn increase competition and coerce the likes of OpenAI and Microsoft to work on increasing the token limits on their chatbots.
This will undoubtedly make these systems more useful, as chatbots will be able to hold longer conversations and potentially take on the task of reading, summarizing, and analyzing long documents in a matter of minutes. As Anthropic notes, “The average person can read 100,000 tokens of text in ~5+ hours, and then they might need substantially longer to digest, remember, and analyze that information. Claude can now do this in less than a minute.”
It’s also worth noting that processing more text means spending more on computing, so the pricing for Anthropic’s expanded chatbot capabilities is likely to increase.
You can request access to Claude here.
Image credit: Anthropic
