Anthropic’s Claude has always been great at coding and working with text, but where Google and OpenAI invested heavily in audio, image, and video models, Anthropic mostly ignored this space. On Thursday, however, Anthropic updated Claude to now also draw interactive charts, diagrams, and visualizations on demand.
The idea here is to have Claude build something graphical “to aid users’ understanding as it’s discussing the topic at hand,” the company says in its announcement. This is now rolling out as a beta to all Claude users on all plan types.
These graphical artifacts are part of the chat, appear inline, and are meant to be ephemeral, changing over the course of a conversation. They are not, Anthropic stresses, permanent artifacts like the documents Claude can create, and hence won’t appear in the Artifacts drawer in the Claude app.
Credit: Anthropic.
To have Claude create a visualization, for example, the easiest way is to simply ask for one, but at times, the model may also decide that creating a graphic may be the best way to handle a question.
Anthropic’s canonical example for this is asking Claude to explain how compound interest works. It’ll create an interactive chart that’s pretty much what you would find if you searched for a compound interest calculator on Google — just without the ads, auto-playing videos, and cookie banners.
In experimenting with this feature, Claude mostly got things right, but like all models, it would also make mistakes. I had it draw a diagram of how airplanes under visual flight rules can approach a non-towered airport for landing, for example. There are hundreds of similar diagrams on the internet.
Claude mostly got this right and created a nice interactive chart. But while it labeled most things right, for the “midfield crosswind entry,” it aligned that arrow with the wrong part of the airport pattern (it’s called a midfield entry because you cross over the middle of the field). Claude isn’t getting its pilot’s license anytime soon.
Credit: Anthropic.
Another issue is that creating these visuals can take a while. Users are accustomed to finding answers in seconds, especially if they are just looking for an image. When it often takes half a minute to create a graphic in Claude, maybe doing a basic search will feel like a better option.
As Anthropic notes in its announcement, Claude has also started using more graphical designs in recent months for a number of topics, such as recipes and weather requests. Those were pre-set designs, though, while this new feature allows Claude to create new ones on the fly.
This new feature in Claude shows how quickly the competition is moving among the top AI labs. On Tuesday, OpenAI launched what it calls “dynamic visual explanations” in ChatGPT, but this feature is mostly focused on explaining math and science topics to students.
Google, meanwhile, debuted interactive charts and simulations for Gemini Ultra subscribers ($200/month) last December. These look like they rival Anthropic’s and OpenAI’s offerings, but they obviously come at a price, whereas Anthropic is making its interactive charts available to all users.
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