Anthropic launches its Claude 3.5 model to challenge OpenAI

Anthropic claims its Claude 3.5 Sonnet model outperforms competitor models on various benchmarks but with the speed and cost of its mid-tier Claude model.

OpenAI challenger company Anthropic has released a new version of its Claude chatbot, which it claims will “raise the industry bar” for intelligence.

Anthropic claims its new model – Claude 3.5 Sonnet – outperforms competitor models on a wide range of evaluations. The company also claims this version of Sonnet beats its more expensive Claude Opus, but with the speed and cost of its Sonnet mid-tier model.

This is the first release of Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 models, which appears to be the company’s move to challenge OpenAI and the release of its GPT 4o model. Claude 3.5 Sonnet is now available for free on Claude.ai and the Claude iOS app, while those paying for the Pro and Team plan subscribers can access it with significantly higher rate limits.

Anthropic said this version of Claude Sonnet operates at twice the speed of its predecessor and that it is ideal for complex tasks, boasting a “marked improvement” in grasping nuance, humour and writing high-quality content “with a natural, relatable tone”.

“In an internal agentic coding evaluation, Claude 3.5 Sonnet solved 64pc of problems, outperforming Claude 3 Opus which solved 38pc,” Anthropic said in a blogpost. “When instructed and provided with the relevant tools, Claude 3.5 Sonnet can independently write, edit and execute code with sophisticated reasoning and troubleshooting capabilities.

“It handles code translations with ease, making it particularly effective for updating legacy applications and migrating codebases.”

However, it’s important to take company claims about its own models with a pinch of salt. Last year, Google-owned DeepMind claimed that one of its AI models found 2.2m new crystals that could potentially be used to create new materials. This claim was later criticised by a group of researchers who said there was “scant evidence” the DeepMind AI found for compounds that “fulfil the trifecta of novelty, credibility, and utility”.

Following the launch of Anthropic’s new Claude model, US psychologist and CEO and founder of Robust AI, Gary Marcus, warned against taking the claims as fact in a post on X. “A single anecdotal physics example is not a tie-breaker here, folks,” he said.

The announcement comes more than a month after Anthropic released its Claude chatbot to Europe and Ireland. It also comes only a few months after the company revealed its Claude 3 family of models.

Anthropic is currently working to establish an office in Dublin, which would be its first office in the EU. The company has gained a large amount of attention in a short space of time and is backed by various tech giants including Google and Amazon.

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