Claude is the family of artificial intelligence models from Anthropic, a US AI company, and also the chat app that uses them, launched in 2023. You type or hand it a file and it answers with text or code: it summarizes, writes, analyzes data and programs. ChatGPT, by contrast, uses OpenAI models.
A question from the app. Pick an answer.
What is special about generative AI?
That is another kind of AI, like the one that flags spam. Generative AI creates.
It generates text, images, audio or code on the spot, from what it learned.
Inside it is all numbers, but what it creates can be text, images or audio.
Claude is both the model and the products that use it. The app (web, desktop and phone) is how you chat with it. The API is the door for other programs to use it: a company builds its support chatbot with Claude inside and you never see the name. Anthropic offers several models, with different capabilities, speeds and costs: to choose, test which one handles your task well.
Inside it works like any LLM: it splits your message into tokens and builds the answer one at a time. What it remembers from the chat lives in its context window. And it can hallucinate: check what matters.
Claude Code is a coding agent: it does not just hand you code to paste: it has tools to work inside your project. It reads the files, edits them, runs the tests and shows you what changed. It reads the project rules from a CLAUDE.md file. Reviewing the diff is still your job.
"Experience with Claude or another LLM" alone does not tell you what tasks you will do: read the rest of the ad. What almost always helps is using it well: write a clear prompt with context, hand it a file and ask for something specific, and check what it returns before you use it. To show it, bring an example: an analysis, a text or a project where you used it, and what you fixed.
What you learn with one carries over to the others: Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini are different products with the same idea inside.
"Claude is the same as Claude Code." Claude is the model and the chat app; Claude Code is a programming tool that uses that model. "If I ask Claude and ChatGPT, I get the same answer." They use models from different companies: their answers can differ, and both can be wrong.