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Financial Times Innovates with Claude: A Leap Forward in AI-Powered Financial Journalism

Dahlia Arnold

Mar 25, 2024


The Financial Times has taken a groundbreaking step in digital journalism by introducing "Ask FT," an AI-driven chatbot powered by Claude, the fine-tuned large language model developed by Anthropic. This service offers subscribers personalized answers drawn from the newspaper's extensive archive, marking a significant shift towards highly specialized AI applications in the media sector.


The deployment of Claude by the Financial Times represents a sophisticated approach to leveraging AI in the news industry. Unlike the broader applications of generalized AI models, Claude has been fine-tuned with a focus on financial journalism, utilizing the rich repository of articles accumulated by the Financial Times over decades. This method of fine-tuning AI models for specific industries allows for more accurate, relevant, and context-aware responses to user inquiries, illustrating a trend towards more customized AI solutions across various sectors​​​​​​.




The move to integrate Claude into the Financial Times' digital offerings highlights an industry-wide exploration into the capabilities of fine-tuned large language models. These models, unlike their more generalized counterparts, are trained on specialized datasets to perform tasks that require a deeper understanding of specific domains. In the case of Ask FT, Claude can sift through decades of financial news and analysis to provide insights that are not only timely but deeply ingrained in the context of financial journalism's rich history.


  • Fine-Tuning for Specialized Needs: Claude's integration into Ask FT showcases the potential of fine-tuned LLMs to transform how information is accessed and utilized in professional settings, particularly in sectors requiring high levels of accuracy and domain-specific knowledge.

  • Enhancing User Experience: By providing personalized and contextually relevant information, Ask FT exemplifies how fine-tuned LLMs can enhance user engagement and satisfaction, offering a glimpse into the future of interactive digital services​​.

  • Broader Implications for AI in Journalism: The success of Ask FT could pave the way for similar applications of fine-tuned LLMs in other fields of journalism, offering a model for how AI can be deployed to enhance content delivery and consumption.

  • Ongoing Developments and Innovations: As AI technologies continue to evolve, the potential for new applications of fine-tuned LLMs in various industries remains vast, with companies like the Financial Times leading the charge in exploring these frontiers​​​​.


Anthropic's Claude 3: is a family of AI models with different strengths. Here's a quick rundown:

  • Strong Reasoning: All Claude 3 models can handle complex tasks, analyze data, and forecast.

  • Text & Image: They can understand and work with both text and images, making them useful for analyzing reports, presentations, and even handwritten notes.

  • Code and Languages: Claude 3 can generate different creative text formats, translate languages, and even write code.

  • Varied Options: The family offers a range of models. Claude 3 Opus is the most powerful, while Claude 3 Haiku is faster and ideal for real-time tasks.

Claude 3 is a powerful tool for various applications, from customer service chatbots to research and creative content generation.


Claude3 Vs ChatGPT4

  • Strengths:

    • Performance: Claims better accuracy on benchmarks like reasoning, knowledge, and code compared to GPT-4.

    • Multilingual: Can understand and respond in multiple languages.

    • Multimodal: Can analyze images and text together (up to 20 images at a time).

    • Constitutional AI: Designed to consider ethical implications during tasks.

    • Larger Input: Can handle up to 200,000 words of input compared to GPT-4's 64,000.

  • Weaknesses:

    • Image Analysis: Can't identify people in images, struggles with low-quality images, and spatial reasoning tasks.

    • Newcomer: Less established than GPT-4, so potentially fewer use cases explored.



The Financial Times' deployment of Claude through Ask FT represents a significant milestone in the application of AI within the journalism industry. By leveraging a fine-tuned LLM, the newspaper not only enhances the value it provides to its subscribers but also sets a precedent for the future of AI in enhancing personalized content delivery. As the technology matures, the potential for fine-tuned LLMs to revolutionize various sectors by providing specialized, accurate, and context-aware insights is becoming increasingly apparent.



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