Life

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In Visit to Columbus, Agriculture Secretary Vilsack Announces New Investments in Local Urban Agriculture

COLUMBUS, Georgia, May 17, 2024 – U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack today visited the Turn Around Columbus, a nonprofit in Columbus, Georgia, focused on investing in youth development and learning opportunities to build the next generation of entrepreneurs, farmers, and community leaders. There, he highlighted the Biden-Harris Administration’s commitment to create more, new and better markets, generate new revenue, and ensure agriculture in Georgia communities and nationwide.

USDA Appoints Key Experts and Thought Leaders to Board that Informs USDA’s Science and Research Priorities

WASHINGTON, May 16, 2024 – The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced today the appointment of 10 members to the National Agricultural Research, Extension, Education, and Economics (NAREEE) Advisory Board. Seven members are new appointments, and three members are re-appointments. Members represent a mix of university, non-profit, and industry representatives.

USDA Easing Producers’ Transition to Organic Production with New Programs and Partnerships, Announces Investments to Create and Expand Organic Markets

WASHINGTON, May 15, 2024 – Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack today announced new programs, partnerships, grant awards and an additional $10 million in funding to expand the markets for organic products and help producers transition to organic production. These programs will support the development of new and better markets for domestic organic products, provide hands-on training to producers transitioning to organic production and ease the financial burden of obtaining organic certification.

The Biggest Differences Between Claude AI and ChatGPT

AI is a fascinating field, one that has seen a ton of advancements in recent years. In fact, OpenAI’s ChatGPT has singlehandedly increased the hype around generative AI to new levels. But the days of ChatGPT being the only viable AI chatbot option are long gone. Now, others are available, including Anthropic’s Claude AI, which has some key differences from the AI chatbot most people are familiar with. The question is this: Can Anthropic’s version of ChatGPT stand up to the original?

What is Anthropic AI?

Anthropic is an AI startup co-founded by ex-OpenAI members. It’s especially notable because the company has a much stricter set of ethics surrounding its AI than OpenAI currently does. The company includes the Amodei siblings, Daniela and Dario, who were instrumental in creating GPT-3.

The Amodei siblings, as well as others, left OpenAI and founded Anthropic to create an alternative to ChatGPT that addressed their AI safety concerns better. One way that Anthropic has differentiated itself from OpenAI is by training its AI to align with a “document of constitutional AI principles,” like opposition to inhumane treatment, as well as support of freedom and privacy.

What is Claude AI?

Claude AI, or the latest version of the model, Claude 3, is Anthropic’s version of ChatGPT. Like ChatGPT, Claude 3 is an AI chatbot with a special large language model (LLM) running behind it. However, it is designed by a different company, and thus offers some differences than OpenAI’s current GPT model. It’s probably the strongest competitor out of the various ChatGPT alternatives that have popped up, and Anthropic continues to update it with a ton of new features and limitations.

Anthropic technically offers four versions of Claude, including Claude 1, Claude 2, Claude-Instant, and the latest update, Claude 3. While each is similar in nature, the language models all offer some subtle differences in capability.

Can Claude do the same things as ChatGPT?

If you have any experience using ChatGPT, you’re already well on your way to using Claude, too. The system uses a simple chat box, in which you can post queries to get responses from the system. It’s as simple as it gets, and you can even copy the responses Claude offers, retry your question, or ask it to provide additional feedback. It’s very similar to ChatGPT.

While Claude can do a lot of the same things that ChatGPT can, there are some limitations. Where ChatGPT now has internet access, Claude is only trained on the information that the developers at Anthropic have provided it with, which is limited to August 2023, according to the latest notes from Anthropic. As such, it cannot look beyond that scope.

Claude also cannot interpret or create images, something that you can now do in ChatGPT thanks to the introduction of DALL-E 3. The company does offer similar things to ChatGPT, including a cheaper and faster processing option—Claude-Instant—that is more premium than Claude 3. The previous update, Claude-2, is considered on-par with ChatGPT’s GPT-4 model. Claude 3, on the other hand, has actually outperformed GPT-4 in a number of areas.

Of course, all of that pales in comparison to what OpenAI has made possible with the newly released GPT-4o. While all of its newest ground-breaking features haven’t released just yet, OpenAI has really upped the ante, bringing full multimodal support to the AI chatbot. Now, ChatGPT will be able to respond directly to questions, you’ll be able to interrupt its answers when using voice mode, and you can even capture both live video and your device’s display and share them directly with the chatbot to get real-time responses.

How much does Claude cost?

Claude AI is actually free to try, though that freedom comes with some limitations, like how many questions you can ask and how much data the chatbot can process. There is a premium subscription, called Claude Pro, which will grant you additional data for just $20 a month.

Unlike ChatGPT’s premium subscription, using the free version of Claude actually gives you access to Claude’s latest model, though you miss out on the added data tokens and higher priority that a subscription offers.

How does Claude’s free version compare to ChatGPT’s?

Like ChatGPT, Claude offers a free version. Both are solid options to try out the AI chatbots, but if you plan to use them extensively, it’s definitely worth looking at the more premium subscription plans that they offer.

While Claude gives you access to its more advanced Claude 3 in the free version, it does come with severe limits. You can’t process PDFs larger than 10 megabytes, for instance, and its usage limits can vary depending on the current load. Anthropic hasn’t shared an exact limit or even a range that you can expect, but CNBC estimates it’s about five summaries every four hours. At the end of the day, it depends on how many people are using the system when you are. The nice thing about Claude 3 is that it brings in a ton of new features you can try out in Claude’s free version, including multilingual capabilities, vision and image processing, as well as easier to steer prompting.

ChatGPT used to limit free users to GPT-3.5, locking them to the older and thus less reliable model. That, however, has changed with the release of GPT-4o, which introduces limited usage rates for free ChatGPT accounts. OpenAI hasn’t shared specifics on how limited GPT-4o is with the free version, but it does give you access to all the improvements the system offers, until you eventually run out of usage and get bumped back down to GPT-3.5.

Still, that does mean you can technically use GPT-4o without paying a single cent. However, there are some limitations in place if the service is extremely busy, and you may see your requests taking much longer or even returned if usage is high. It’s also possible that your free ChatGPT account may not even be available during certain times of high activity, as OpenAI sometimes limits access to free accounts to help mitigate high server usage.

It’s also important to note that ChatGPT 3.5 is more likely to hallucinate than GPT-4 and the newer GPT-4o does, so it’s important to double-check all the information that it provides. (That said, you should always double-check important information generated by AI.) The free version of ChatGPT also now has access to the GPT Store: Here, you can make use of various GPTs, which personalize the chatbot to respond to your questions and queries in different ways. Claude doesn’t currently offer any kind of system like this, so you’ll have to word your prompts correctly to get the most out of it.

Claude Pro vs. ChatGPT Plus: How much is a subscription?

If you’re planning to use Claude or ChatGPT extensively, it might be worth upgrading to one of the currently available monthly plans. Both Anthropic and OpenAI offer subscription plans, so how do you decide which one to purchase? Here’s how they stack up against each other.

Claude Pro costs $20 a month. Unlike ChatGPT Plus (which gives you access to OpenAI’s GPT-4 and GPT-4 Turbo model), Claude already offers its latest and greatest model in the free and limited plan. As such, subscribing for $20 a month will simply reward you with at least five times the usage of the free service, making it easier to send longer messages and have longer conversations before the context tokens on the AI run out (context tokens determine how much information the AI can understand when it responds), as well as increasing the length of files that you can attach. Claude Pro will also get you faster response times and higher availability and priority when demand is high.

On the other hand, ChatGPT Plus seems to offer a bit more for that $20 subscription, as it nets you GPT-4 and GPT-4 Turbo, OpenAI’s most complex and successful language models. These models are capable of far more than the free systems available in ChatGPT without a subscription. Subscribing to ChatGPT Plus will also get you faster response times, priority access when demand for the chatbot is high, and access to the newest features, such as DALL-E 3’s image creation option.

Is Claude AI more accurate than ChatGPT?

Accuracy is an area that AI language models, such as those that run Claude and ChatGPT, still struggle with. While these models can be accurate and are trained on terabytes of data, they have been known to “hallucinate” and create their own facts and data.

My own experience has shown that Claude tends to be more factually accurate when summarizing things than ChatGPT, but that’s based on a very small subset of data. And Claude’s data is extremely outdated if you’re looking to discuss recent happenings. It also doesn’t have open access to the internet, so you’re more limited in the possible ways that it can hallucinate or pull from bad sources, which is a blessing and a curse, as it locks you out of the good sources, too.

No matter which service you go with, they’re both going to have problems, and you’ll want to double-check any information that ChatGPT or Claude provides you with to ensure it isn’t plagiarized from something else—or just entirely made up.

Is Claude better than ChatGPT?

There are some places where Claude is better than ChatGPT, though Claude 3 reportedly outperforms ChatGPT’s latest models based on Anthropic’s data. The biggest difference, for starters, is that Claude offers a much safer approach to the use of AI, with more restrictions placed upon its language models that ChatGPT just doesn’t offer. This includes more restrictive ethics, though ChatGPT has continued to evolve how it approaches the ethics of AI as a whole.

Claude also offers longer context token limits than ChatGPT currently does. Tokens are broken-down pieces of text the AI can understand (OpenAI says one token is roughly four characters of text.) Claude offers 200,000 tokens for Claude 3, while GPT-4 tops out at 32,000 in some plans, which may be useful for those who want to have longer conversations before they have to worry about the AI model losing track of what they are talking about. This increased size in context tokens means that Claude is much better at analyzing large files, which is something to keep in mind if you plan to use it for that sort of thing.

However, there are also several areas that ChatGPT comes ahead. Access to the internet is a big one: Having open access to the internet means ChatGPT is always up-to-date on the latest information on the web. It also means the bot is susceptible to more false information, though, so there’s definitely a trade-off. With the introduction of GPT-4o’s upcoming features like voice mode, ChatGPT will be able to respond to your queries in real-time: If Claude has plans for a similar feature set, it hasn’t entertained it publicly just yet.

OpenAI has also made it easy to create your own custom GPTs using its API and language models, something that, as I noted above, Claude doesn’t support just yet. In addition. ChatGPT gives you in-chat image creation thanks to DALL-E 3, which is actually impressive for AI image generation.

Ultimately, Claude and ChatGPT are both great AI chatbots that offer a ton of usability for those looking to dip their toes in the AI game. If you want the latest, cutting-edge, though, the trophy currently goes to ChatGPT, as the things you’re able to do with GPT-4o open entirely new doors that Claude isn’t trying to open just yet.

11 of the Best Methods for Decluttering Your Home

There are so many techniques and methods out there to help you declutter your home, but they all have the same goal: downsizing how much junk you have and getting the rest of it organized. Where they differ is methodologies. Some are better suited to larger homes or heavier junk volumes, for instance, while others leave some wiggle room for items you feel sentimental about and are hesitant to part with, and some force you to be a little more objective and decisive when tossing things out. Here are some of my favorite decluttering techniques.

The ski-slope method

Anita Yokota’s ski-slope method was born from her experience as a licensed therapist and interior designer and is meant to help you declutter in a way that won’t be overwhelming for you mentally. She outlines the method in her book Home Therapy: Interior Design for Increasing Happiness, Boosting Confidence, and Creating Calm, suggesting you imagine your messy room like a ski slope, zig-zagging from section to section instead of working in a straight line, as you would if you were skiing down a hill.

Rather than looking at it as a whole (a huge mess you’ll never be able to clean!), start in one corner or section and work from there: Clean, declutter, and organize. Move to the next side or section and do it again. Continue moving through the room, working from side to side. As you finish each section, you can pause for a break if you need to, then pick back up where you left off.

Project 333

Adhere to the TikTok-famous Project 333, which comes from comes from Courtney Carver’s Project 333: The Minimalist Fashion Challenge That Proves Less Really Is So Much More, if you want to pare down your wardrobe and create a “capsule wardrobe” of basic, mix-and-matchable pieces over time. Start by selecting only 33 pieces of clothing, jewelry, and accessories (excluding underwear or sentimental, everyday-wear jewelry), then boxing everything else up for three months. At the end of that time, you’ll have combined your 33 pieces to make outfits and will have a better sense of what you really need for daily wear and what you own that might be good for donating.

For a similar approach, you can adapt the Pareto principle or 80/20 rule, recognizing that you use about 20% of your stuff 80% of the time, whether that’s the clothes you wear every day, the kitchen tools you use to make your most common meals, or anything else that you reach for the majority of the time. Once you start identifying the 80% of things you rarely use, it becomes pretty easy to give them the boot.

The 12-12-12 method

This is one of the longer-term methods on the list and it calls on you to overhaul your lifestyle a bit. When you use the 12-12-12 method, you find 12 things to throw away, 12 things to donate, and 12 things to put away—every day. With 12 in each category every day, you’re dealing with a number small enough to work with in an achievable way but big enough to make an impact on your clutter. Of course, you can move that number up or down slightly to accommodate your own needs, but the real idea here is that you get in the habit of identifying what you can get rid of and what needs to be organized and put away every day.

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The Organizational Triangle

Another longer-term, lifestyle-altering approach is the use of the Organizational Triangle, a concept from by pro organizer Andrew Mellen, the man behind The Most Organized Man in America’s Guide to Moving and Unstuff Your Life: Kick the Clutter Habit and Completely Organize Your Life for Good. This three-tiered approach provides a simple process for maintaining a clutter-free home:

  • Every item needs a home

  • Keep like with like

  • Use a “something in, something out” approach

By making sure you get into the habit of putting everything where it belongs (and getting rid of things that don’t belong anywhere), storing everything with related items, and getting rid of one thing every time you bring something new in, you can not only get organized, but stay organized.

The five-second rule

The five-second rule is a trick you can use when you’re decluttering to make fast decisions about what stays and what goes. It’s a widely-adaptable technique from organizational coach Mel Robbins, who advocates for it in her books. Basically, you should make major decisions in under five seconds, counting down five, four, three, two, one so your brain senses some urgency. At the end of the countdown, you have to make a choice and when you’re decluttering, you’ll decide whether to keep something and find a place for it or toss it or donate it. In your heart, you already know which items are useful and need to stick around. Instead of deliberating over the decision, make it fast and keep going so you don’t lose momentum.

If you’re really stuck after five seconds, there are two questions you can ask yourself to illuminate the right choice: According to organizational gurus the Minimalists, you should ask yourself, “Could I replace this item for less than $20?” and “Could I replace it in less than 20 minutes?” If the answer to both is yes, that thing can go. The space you’ll save by tossing it will be worth the $20 you may spend in the unlikely event you ever need it again.

KonMari

Arguably the most famous method on the list, Marie Kondo’s KonMari leaves a little room for the items you care about, even if they have fewer practical uses than others. Kondo’s method of organizing follows a few simple steps designed to ensure “you will never again relapse to clutter.” Here’s what she calls for: 

  1. Commit yourself to tidying up.

  2. Imagine your ideal lifestyle.

  3. Finish discarding first.

  4. Tidy by category and not by location.

  5. Follow the right order.

  6. Ask yourself if it sparks joy, and get rid of it if it doesn’t.

The Peter Walsh method

Walsh method is similar to Kondo’s, but a little stricter. Compare her steps with his and spot the differences:

  1. Empty your space.

  2. Create a vision for the space and set an intention for it.

  3. Sort everything you removed into a “vision” pile and an “out-the-door” pile.

  4. Get rid of the “out-the-door pile” by donating or throwing everything away.

  5. Move everything from the “vision” pile back into the space.

Fully emptying your space is more intense than just organizing it as-is, so choose this technique if you really need an overhaul.

Decluttering at the Speed of Life

The Decluttering at the Speed of Life method comes from Dana K. White, who has chronicled her “deslobification” journey on a blog since she began in 2009. She took notes of all her wins and failures as she sought to find a way to declutter without getting overwhelmed, keeping track of what worked and what didn’t—and ultimately published a book, Decluttering at the Speed of Life: Winning Your Never-Ending Battle with Stuff. To utilize her technique, select a small area, and do these five things:

  1. Start with trash, like receipts, wrappers, bags, anything that is broken, expired food or products, or anything you simply don’t need or use at all. Throw all that away.

  2. Do the easy stuff. Put everything you see out of place back where it belongs.

  3. Categorize “duh clutter,” or anything that could be donated. Keep a box on hand and toss anything worthy of donation into it. 

  4. Ask yourself one or two decluttering questions. First, “If I needed this item, where would I look for it?” If you can instantly think of an answer, take the item where it belongs. If you can’t think of an answer, ask a follow-up: “If I needed this item, would it occur to me that I already had one?” Get rid of the thing if the answers are no.

  5. Finally, make it fit. Only keep what you have space for and organize those.

Throw a packing party

Another intense, room-clearing option is the “packing party,” which also comes from the Minimalists. To throw a packing party, invite your friends over and have them help you pack everything in the room into boxes, as if you were moving, and label those boxes. For three weeks after that, live your life as normal, only pulling things out of the boxes if and as you need them. At the end of the three weeks, go through whatever you haven’t needed and commit to throwing or donating most of it. This method helps you “move back in” to a cleaner space full of only the things you really need.

365 Less Things

Colleen Madsen’s unique 365 Less Things technique is a slow burn. It will take a year to complete, but at the end of that year, you’ll be living in a cleaner, more organized space—and will have built up the habits that can keep it that way. All you do is commit to getting rid of one thing every day for a year. The goal here isn’t instant progress, but incremental progress that you can learn from. Set a reminder in your phone for every day at a certain time and, when the alarm goes off, find one thing to get rid of. You can donate it, sell it, or throw it away, but it has to go. The beauty of this method is that while it takes time, the time is actually beneficial: Eventually, it’ll become second nature to find and get rid of one thing in your home every day. Plus, decluttering so incrementally is a lot less overwhelming than other methods of home cleaning and organization, so it’s perfect for if you’re feeling too put-upon by the daunting task.

The Before and After technique

Finally, if you’re a more visual person, the Before and After approach from Becoming Minimalist is for you. Pick a small section of your home, like a countertop or junk drawer, and snap a picture of it. Then, clean it up. Just focus on the small area you photographed. Once you’re done, take a new picture and compare the two. Do this any time you have a few minutes to dedicate to a minor cleaning task, so the pics are right next to each other in your camera roll. When you can see the difference just by swiping between the two photos, you’ll feel motivated to keep going. Without the pictures, it can be hard to remember what the mess even looked like, so you won’t stay as motivated to clean or keep it clean.

If you need more motivation, here are my favorite tools to use to declutter.