Anthropics Claude AI can now read an entire book in less than a minute
AI already ingests information fast, but now it can detect changes in that information even faster.
Key takeaways
- Anthropic says it has vastly expanded the amount of information its Generative AI, Claude, is able to process.
- Claude has gone from having a limit of 9,000 tokens to 100,000 tokens, which corresponds to roughly 75,000 words.
- At the moment, OpenAI's standard GPT-4 model is capable of processing 8,000 tokens, while an extended version can process 32,000 tokens.
Cite or link to this article
Griffin, M. (2023) 'Anthropics Claude AI can now read an entire book in less than a minute', 311 Institute, 23 June. Available at: https://www.311institute.com/anthropics-claude-can-now-read-an-entire-book-in-less-than-a-minute/ (Accessed: 1 October 2026).
Anthropic says it has vastly expanded the amount of information its Generative AI, Claude, is able to process. Claude has gone from having a limit of 9,000 tokens to 100,000 tokens, which corresponds to roughly 75,000 words. That's a full novel. To put that into perspective, Claude now has the ability to easily read and finish Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (74,240 words), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (74,800 words) and Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (69,000 words). And, as The Verge notes, the company says Claude can read and analyze information from each book in under a minute.
Generative AIs like Claude are still limited by the number of "tokens" they can process. As OpenAI explains in its help page, you can think of tokens as pieces of words. The AI cuts up words for processing, and they're not always chopped up from the start to the end of each word, since spaces and other characters are also included. At the moment, OpenAI's standard GPT-4 model is capable of processing 8,000 tokens, while an extended version can process 32,000 tokens. Meanwhile, its publicly available ChatGPT chatbot has a limit of around 4,000 tokens.
Now Claude has a much wider context window than all of them. According to Anthropic, it loaded Great Gatsby onto the AI during testing and modified a single line to say Mr. Carraway was "a software engineer that works on machine learning tooling at Anthropic." Claude was able to spot how the book was modified within 22 seconds which is impressive.
The AI's expanded context window is now available to Anthropic's business partners who are using its API. Anthropic says the capability will help businesses quickly digest and summarise lengthy financial statements and research papers, assess pieces of legislation, identify risks and arguments across legal documents and comb through dense developer documentation, among other possible tasks.
FAQ
Why does this matter?
AI already ingests information fast, but now it can detect changes in that information even faster.
About the author
Matthew Griffin Founder, 311 Institute
Matthew Griffin is a multi-award winning Futurist and expert in Disruption and Innovation, Geopolitics, Leadership, and Technology, who NASA have described as a "walking encyclopaedia of the future" and a "futurist Polymath."
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Matthew Griffin is a multi-award winning Futurist and expert in Disruption and Innovation, Geopolitics, Leadership, and Technology, who NASA have described as a "walking encyclopaedia of the future" and a "futurist Polymath." 15-time best selling author of the "Codex of the Future" series, Matthew is the Founder and Futurist in Chief of the 311 Institute, a global Futures and Deep Futures advisory firm working with royal households, world leaders, G7, G20, and G77 governments, NGOs, and multi-national mid and mega cap firms to help them explore, shape, and lead the next 50 years of business and society.
An award-winning YouTube creator with over a million followers, with an unrivalled global reach and impact, Matthew is a highly sought-after international keynote speaker, lecturer, and mentor who collaborates with global leaders through the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC) and United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) to shape pivotal initiatives such as the UN’s AI for Humanity program, the United Nations Conference of the Parties (UN COP), and the World Economic Forum in Davos.
As the former Global Head of Cloud, National Security, and Enterprise Sales for companies including Atos, Dell-EMC, and IBM, Matthew has a proven track record of building multi-billion dollar business units and turning failing divisions into market leaders. His ability to identify, analyse, and communicate the implications of hundreds of emerging technologies and trends is unparalleled, and his insights are trusted by many of the world’s most respected organisations, including ABB, Accenture, Adidas, AON, ARM, BCG, Centrica, Citi, Coca-Cola, Dentons, Deloitte, Dow Jones, EY, Google, KPMG, Lego, Legal & General, LinkedIn, Microsoft, PepsiCo, Qualcomm, RWE, Samsung, Siemens AG and Siemens Energy, T-Mobile, UBS, VISA, Walmart, Workday, Worldpay and many others.
Regularly featured in the global media including the AP, BBC, Bloomberg, CNBC, Discovery, Forbes, Khaleej Times, Telegraph, TIME, ViacomCBS, WIRED, and the WSJ, Matthews mission is to help organisations create a fair and sustainable future whose benefits are shared by everyone irrespective of their ability, background, or circumstances.
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Sources and further reading
- 100k context windows anthropic.com
- Chatbot language model context window memory anthropic claude theverge.com
- 4936856 what are tokens and how to count them help.openai.com
- 7127966 what is the difference between the gpt 4 models help.openai.com
- Mastering ai token limits and memory ce920630349a medium.com
Source: first published by the 311 Institute on 23 June 2023. Cite as: Griffin, M. (2023). Anthropics Claude AI can now read an entire book in less than a minute. 311 Institute. https://www.311institute.com/anthropics-claude-can-now-read-an-entire-book-in-less-than-a-minute/
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