AI has fully entered the era of paid services! Anthropic launches a premium version of AI chatbot for $20 per month.

After half a year of intense competition, the big model competition has gradually cooled down. The bosses have decided that it's time for the users to pay the bill. More and more AI products are rapidly launching paid versions.

Anthropic, a star startup comparable to OpenAI, is a prime example. This company, which is backed by Google's investment and computing power, has just launched a paid version of its chatbot, Claude, in the UK and the US.

Claude is considered the strongest competitor to GPT-4, with little difference in performance, but it lacks the richness of API ecosystem compared to GPT. Claude originally only had a free version, but this newly launched professional version is priced at $20/month or £18/month. After purchasing, users can enjoy features such as priority response, early access to new functions, and the ability to send more messages.

Compared to the free version, Claude Pro has a usage limit that is 5 times higher than the regular version. In addition, the Pro version supports a context length of up to 100K, while ChatGPT Plus only supports a maximum context length of 32K. In other words, Claude Pro can handle longer and more complex prompts than its competitors.

Claude was launched in March this year, with its main selling points being "easy communication" and "less harmful information". Initially, it could only be used on Slack or limited to enterprise customers. After the upgrade to Claude 2 in July, it began to be widely promoted in the UK and the US.

Almost all of Anthropic's management team members have a background in OpenAI. In the latest financing round led by Google, Anthropic raised over $400 million, bringing its total funding to $1.45 billion and its valuation to over $4 billion. Most of the cash, including revenue from products like Claude Pro, will be used to improve computing power. In its report, Anthropic hinted that it relies on a cluster with "tens of thousands of GPUs" to train its models, and it will need to spend approximately $1 billion on infrastructure in the next 18 months alone.

More and more AI chatbots are placing commercialization in a more important position. Anthropic is currently collaborating with "American Quora" Quora, allowing users to experience Claude Pro through Quora's AI chatbot, Poe (at the same price). In addition, Microsoft Bing Chat has recently launched a commercial version with better privacy protection.