The AI arms race is in full swing: Anthropic is launching its latest model, called the Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which it says can perform tasks equal to or better than OpenAI's GPT-4o or Google's Gemini. can The new model is already available to Claude users on the web and iOS, and Anthropic is also making it available to developers.
The Claude 3.5 Sonnet will eventually be the middle model in the lineup — Anthropic uses the name Haiku for its smallest model, Sonnet for the mainstream mid-range option, and Opus for its highest-end model. (The names are weird, but it seems like every AI company is naming things in their own peculiarly weird ways, so we'll let it slide.) But the company says the 3.5 Sonnet outranks the 3 Ops. delivers, and its benchmarks show that it does. Quite a wide margin. The new model is also apparently twice as fast as the previous model, which could be an even bigger deal.
AI model standards should always be taken with a grain of salt. There are so many of them, it's easy to pick and choose the ones that look good to you, and the models and products are changing so fast that no one has an edge for long. That said, the Claude 3.5 Sonnet looks impressive: it outscored the GPT-4o, Gemini 1.5 Pro, and Meta's Llama 3 400B in seven of nine overall benchmarks and four of five vision benchmarks. . Again, don't read too much into this, but it looks like Anthropic has built a legitimate competitor in this space.
What does all this really amount to? Cloud 3.5 will be much better at writing and translating sonnet code, handling multi-step workflows, interpreting charts and graphs, and copying text from images, Anthropic says. This new and improved Claude is also apparently better at understanding humor and can write in a much more human way.
Along with the new model, Anthropic is also introducing a new feature called Artifacts. With Artifacts, you'll be able to see and interact with the results of your Claude requests: if you ask the model to design something for you, it can now show you what it looks like. and lets you edit it right in the app. If Claude writes you an email, you can edit the email in the Claude app instead of copying it into a text editor. It's a small feature, but a smart one — these AI tools need to be more than simple chatbots, and features like artifacts let the app do more.
The patterns actually seem to indicate a long-term vision for Claude. Anthropic has long said it's mostly focused on business (it even hires consumer tech people like Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger), and in its press release announcing the Cloud 3.5 Sonnet She said she plans to turn Cloud into a tool for companies to “securely. Centralize their knowledge, documents, and work-in-progress in one common place.” It looks more like Concept or Slack than ChatGPT, with Anthropic's models at the heart of the whole system.
For now, though, the model is the big news. And the pace of improvement here is worth seeing: Anthropic launched Claude 3 Opus in March, boasting that it was as good as GPT-4 and Gemini 1.0, before OpenAI and Google improved their models. Released versions. Now, Anthropic has made its next move, and surely it won't be long before its competition does the same. Cloud isn't as talked about as Gemini or Chat GPT, but it's very much in the running.