Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in early January that Claude would get a few upgrades to put it on par with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. He mentioned advanced reasoning support and internet search abilities were in the works for Claude, but didn’t commit to rollout schedules for either feature.
Anthropic released Claude 3.7 Sonnet a few weeks ago, which offered the reasoning features Amodei teased, including an extended thinking mode feature. However, search was not part of the deal, which isn’t ideal. After using ChatGPT with online search support for so long, I can’t imagine going back to genAI experiences that do not involve the ability to look up new information on the internet.
Thankfully, Anthropic added online search support to Claude 3.7 Sonnet, which should further enhance its responses. The feature is limited, as you might expect. You’ll need access to a paid subscription to get it, and you also have to be in the US.
Unlike OpenAI, Claude isn’t launching a search product. When OpenAI did that a few months ago, it led to a big overhaul of the ChatGPT UI. ChatGPT now performs internet searches when you click the Search button, but I never do that. I usually tell the AI to find me specific information, which ChatGPT interprets as having to search the web. The AI complies.
Anthropic’s internet search support will work similarly. The AI will know when to search the web for updated information based on how you formulate your prompt. There’s no new internet search button in the composer, at least in the demo the company offers in the blog post.
Like ChatGPT, Claude provides a source for the information it cites so you can check for accuracy. Given that AIs still hallucinate information, you’ll want to check the sources for what Claude says in its responses.
Anthropic offers various examples of using Claude with web search, most of them focusing on enterprise customers who might subscribe to Claude. Sales teams, financial analysts, and researchers are the first three categories of Claude users that can benefit from AI web searches.
But the company also mentions shoppers who “can compare product features, prices, and reviews across multiple sources to make more informed purchase decisions” with Claude.
I’ll repeat what I said above. I don’t want to talk to chatbots that can’t access the web for updated information. The training data cutoffs might not be that old, but they aren’t good enough for most of my needs.
To get started with Claude search, you’ll have to toggle on the web search option in your profile, assuming you’re a paying subscriber in the US. Thankfully, Anthropic says support for the free Claude plan and more countries is coming soon.
Claude Pro starts at $20/month, matching the ChatGPT Plus subscription price.
The post Claude 3.7 Sonnet AI now supports web search, but only for paid users appeared first on BGR.
