Anthropic Counters Google with Future-Ready Information Retrieval API
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We have some big news out of Anthropic, and that is that they are finally adding web search to their API for their AI chatbot. So essentially, if you're using the API, meaning you're a developer or someone that's incorporating Claude's, you know, chatshipping competitor, Anthropic's chatshipping competitor, Claude, into your services, you now have the ability to add web results, meaning it has up-to-date real-time data. This makes anyone using the service

It makes it so much better. I'm super excited. I want to break down the costs, what people's responses are, what the use cases are, and why now. Because there's a couple other players that have been trying to do some similar things

We're going to get into all of that on the episode. Before we do, I wanted to mention that my startup, AI Box, which currently has Claude on there, has just launched and is currently in beta. So it has AI Box Playground, which essentially is a place where you can access all of the top models, including Claude, ChatGPT, image models, audio models, all in the same chat for $20 a month. So instead of paying subscriptions to every platform, you can pay one subscription, get access to all of the models,

and chat with all of them in the same chat. So you can go check it out at AIbox.ai. If you have any ideas for new features, we're rolling stuff out rapidly. So check it out and let me know what you think of AIbox Playgrounds Beta. And I hope it saves you some money and lets you access some new models you haven't tried or used before. Okay, let's get into what's going on with Anthropic.

So they're rolling out the API, meaning I can now add this to AI Box, which I'm excited about. And it has web search enabled. I want to talk a little bit about what they said over on Twitter. If you're watching it on YouTube or Spotify, you can see some of the demos of what it's actually able to do. Otherwise, I'll just explain it for everyone on Apple. Watching over on Apple tweeted out and said, web search is now available in our API. Developers can augment Claude's comprehensive...

You know, pretty impressive. And they are running through essentially asking it to, you know, it says someone's asking for some help with a TypeScript thing. It's code, right? Because Claude is used for a lot of code.

It goes through and essentially shows that it has some search results. It says to upgrade your app to TypeScript 5.5, recommend the following update, and it goes through exactly what it would recommend. But it had to go do a web search in order to respond to the user. So this is pretty exciting. It's getting significantly better now that it can actually go and search the web, especially when you have things that are updating.

The cool thing that I am finding here is that beyond just having, you know, Claude do this, they're actually rolling this out into a bunch of their other tools. So Claude code, for example, which is what we use over AI box to help us write code for

For our platform, Cloud Code, which literally replaced a handful of developers for us, one person can do the work of like three developers and probably one designer. They're now adding this there as well. So when we had code that might have just kind of been old and stale, when something new comes out, Cloud Code can now actually go search the web and do it.

So here's what they said that I thought was pretty cool. They said with web search enabled, Claude uses its own reasoning to determine whether a search would help inform a more accurate response. Claude can also operate agentically and conduct multiple searches using earlier results to inform subsequent queries. So this is kind of cool.

So beyond just being able to, you know, go do a web search and be like, hey, look, like we can't find the best information. I bet, you know, we need to do a web search to get more up to date information. That's kind of what the reasoning model is now built in to do.

Instead of just that, it actually can act what they're saying, quote unquote, agentically and say, look, we need to accomplish a series of tasks. We're going to do one web search for that. Then we're going to do another web search based off of the information we gathered there to figure out the next step and so on. So they can go through like a handful of these web searches, which is really, really interesting. And some people argue, you know, not great because they're worried that these AI agents are going to take away too much bandwidth on the internet searching for things. But I mean, if it's getting someone some information, I'm really not too concerned. Okay.

What did they say after that? They said every response using web search includes citations. This is particularly valuable for more sensitive use cases that require accuracy and accountability. You can further control responses by allowing or blocking specific domains. Get started with our docs. So

They walk through what this actually looks like. But the one thing that I thought was really interesting here was the fact that they actually are allowing you to have blocked domains. They say specified domains that cannot be accessed by Anthropix web search tool. So if you only want it to be searching on specific domains, you can do that. But if you also are like, hey, like, you know, not safe for work websites, we don't ever want it to get anywhere near that. Or maybe, you know, we have a competitor website.

And for our specific use case, you know, we're a water supply company.

uh, dongle company. And so anytime someone wants to buy something that's being related to water supplies and they're asking a question about it, we don't want it to ever reference our competitor. We only want it to reference us. So you can say either only reference us or just don't reference our competitors. So there's a lot of really cool things I think for safety security and then also for businesses, um, and just making sure it's a competitive landscape where it's not touching, uh, their competitors. I think that's really cool. And I would also make a prediction that, um,

Um, if you can build like, I, like I'm thinking if you can build tools, like we've always been able to do, right? Like there's, um, a lot of companies have built like mini apps that just help people do things and they don't necessarily generate revenue, but these little mini apps are like lead generation or other things.

You can imagine how valuable this would be. Let's say you build a search engine for... Or maybe like a search tool or maybe not. You don't even call it a search engine or a search tool. It's more just like an AI chatbot that's the best at helping you do music promotion, right? Like some random thing. And...

You just SEO this thing to the top or you get this rank to the top people or everyone just references you they know you're the best AI bot to do X Y & Z that's a you know that gives massage therapists advice or that gives Music promoters advice or that gives club promoters advice or like whatever like some sort of specific use case there's like a tool that helps that specific type of people and

You can imagine how valuable this would be to control and to make yours the number one because you can essentially block it from accessing any of your competitors and you tip it in the scales of trying to promote your own business. So this is pretty cool.

Like I mentioned, Anthropic is now bringing the same web search to Cloud Code, which is really cool. Cloud Code is particularly interesting because it ties into your code base. So it knows the context of your entire code base beyond just, you know, like with ChatGPT and a lot of these other places, like people copy and paste code and be like, hey, like I'm writing some code. It needs to do X, Y, and Z. Can you help me to make it a little bit better? And, you know, these code tools can write them a little bit of code.

Cloud Code's extra powerful because it actually has access to your code base. It knows how you write code for us in particular over AI Box. When we're redesigning a page, we're just like, "Hey, redesign this page, but make it look like all the other pages on our site with our same branding, color, styles." And it will kind of bring it over and it looks amazing. So I'm like super, super excited.

Cloud Code is in beta. It's a research preview, but we are using it a ton. So I know a lot of other people are as well. Very, very powerful tool. And we're super stoked that it's getting access to the internet as well. So I think a lot of people are going to be excited about this. This is going to be shown off in a lot of different software. And I think it's going to have a big implication on people that build tools.

and are able to block out their competitors essentially from being mentioned in any tools that they're creating. So very, very cool. Again, if you want to check out AIbox.ai, our playground to test a cloud or any other AI model, check it out. The link's in the description. Thank you so much for tuning in and I will catch you next time.