The AI Wire ●

Anthropic released Claude, its first public conversational AI assistant, initially through an API available to select partners and developers. The model was trained with the company's Constitutional AI approach, which aimed to steer behavior with a written set of principles rather than pure human feedback.

Claude arrived about three and a half months after ChatGPT and positioned itself as a safety-first alternative from a team founded by former OpenAI researchers. Early access went through a waitlist while Anthropic scaled up capacity.

The launch began the numbered Claude lineage that Anthropic has iterated ever since, from Claude 2 through the 3.x, 4.x, and 5.x generations.

Google launched Bard in March 2023, its hurried response to ChatGPT, built on the LaMDA conversational model. The rollout followed a shaky announcement in February — including a factual error in its own demo — that wiped billions off Alphabet's market value.

Bard opened to the public through a waitlist and gradually expanded, but it consistently trailed ChatGPT in capability through 2023. Google positioned it as an experiment while its stronger Gemini models were still in training.

In February 2024 Google retired the Bard name entirely, rebranding the assistant as Gemini and folding it into the model family that succeeded it.

OpenAI released ChatGPT as a free research preview, a conversational interface built on a GPT-3.5-series model. It could answer questions, write essays and code, and hold extended back-and-forth conversations — and it exploded, reaching an estimated 100 million users within two months, the fastest-growing consumer app in history at the time.

The launch kicked off the modern AI race overnight. Google declared a 'code red' within weeks, Microsoft deepened its OpenAI partnership, and every major lab reorganized around conversational AI.

ChatGPT's underlying model was GPT-3.5, an instruction-tuned evolution of GPT-3. It set the template for everything that followed: the chat interface, RLHF-tuned assistants, and the Plus subscription tier that arrived the following February.