The AI arms race just got faster: Anthropic on Thursday unfurled its newest model, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, that it says outshines OpenAI’s GPT-40 and Google’s Gemini in reading, coding, math and vision benchmark tests.
The latest version, which comes three months after its predecessor, Claude 3 Opus, is more than three times faster while priced in line with its mid-tier predecessor, Claude 3 Sonnet, according to Anthropic. It is the latest entrant in a market expected to top $1 trillion in revenue within a decade.
“This now represents the best and most intelligent model in the industry,” Anthropic co-founder and president Daniela Amodei, told Fast Company in an interview.
“Claude 3.5 Sonnet operates at twice the speed of Claude 3 Opus. This performance boost, combined with cost-effective pricing, makes Claude 3.5 Sonnet ideal for complex tasks such as context-sensitive customer support and orchestrating multi-step workflows,” Anthropic said in a blog post Thursday.
The technological boast, the latest in a string of claims by Anthropic and its competitors that amount to bragging rights, have taken on the sheen of the space race during the Cold War. For every claim of faster speed and feeds, a counterclaim is sure to follow in the pursuit of developers, investors and customers.
The company, which has collected billions of dollars in funding from the likes of Amazon.com Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Salesforce Inc., said an internal agentic coding evaluation concluded that Claude 3.5 Sonnet solved 64% of problems, vs. 38% for Claude 3 Opus.
Users can try the new Anthropic model for free at Claude.ai and via the Claude iOS app, but with usage limits.
Anthropic also debuted a feature called “Artifacts” that lets enterprise users collaborate with one another and Claude in real time. Last month, Anthropic unveiled its first enterprise product.
Called Team, it is the result of months of development and beta-testing with dozens of customers from industries in tech, financial services, legal services, and health care, Amodei told CNBC in May.
