How to get the best out of Claude Pro as Anthropic increases access to 100k token model

Artificial intelligence startup Anthropic has launched its much anticipated paid subscription service Claude Pro to offer more usage of its 100k token conversational AI assistant Claude.

The San Francisco-based company introduced the $20 per month service on Sept. 7 as a way for power users to get more productivity from Claude’s large language model capabilities by allowing increased usage.

With the paid Claude Pro plan, subscribers can get five times more usage than Anthropic’s free tier. This enables users to have more extended conversations with Claude by sending many more messages over an 8-hour period.

Founded by former OpenAI employees in 2021 after raising $124 million, Anthropic is focused on building safe artificial general intelligence (AGI). The founders were reportedly motivated by concerns about the safety and ethics of advanced AI systems.

Claude’s UI compares with ChatGPT as a simple chat interface. However, each Claude conversation can handle a context of over 25,000 words, while ChatGPT (GPT4 model) is limited to around 2,500 words. The longer context window, officially 100,000 tokens, allows users to feed large batches of written information into Claude to analyze and give feedback.

Get the best out of Claude.

For example, if a user is summarizing a research paper, they could ask Claude detailed questions about it and get paragraph-length summaries of critical sections. The extended usage limits in Claude Pro allow for deeper research tasks like this. Essentially, users can have a ‘conversation’ with the information being analyzed, with Claude retaining tens of thousands of words of text in each research task.

Exact usage limits will vary based on factors like the length of messages and the size of file attachments. Anthropic says the average conversation length on its platform is around 200 sentences, for which Claude Pro would allow approximately 100 messages every 8 hours.

The subscription also provides priority access to Claude during high-traffic periods and early access to new features.

To maximize usage, Anthropic advises Claude Pro subscribers to:

• Start new conversations for each new topic, such as “Claude, here is a new research paper I need help summarizing,” rather than continuing a long conversation. This limits the amount of context Claude needs to “re-read” each time.
• Ask multiple questions at once in a single message instead of sending each question individually. For example, “What are the key findings of this paper? What research methods were used?” This also limits the need for Claude to “re-read.”
• Avoid re-uploading the duplicate files repeatedly, as Claude retains the context unless users start a new conversation.

The critical aspect is that Claude Pro’s limitations appear based on token usage rather than message limits. ChatGPT’s paid tier limits the number of messages per hour but not the length of messages. Anthropic’s approach applies a more granular ‘fair-usage’ policy, limiting the overall volume sent to its LLM rather than the number of queries.

Anthropic says the limits are intended to make Claude freely available for many users to try while still providing increased capacity to paying power users.

The company first launched Claude in July 2022 as an AI assistant focused on harmless, honest, helpful conversations. Claude Pro is now available in the U.S. and U.K.