Anthropic has announced the arrival of Claude 3.5 Sonnet, a new AI assistant model that claims the top spot in the race for AI assistant dominance. This powerful model outperforms both Gemini 1.5 Pro and ChatGPT-4o across a spectrum of benchmark tests. Notably, Sonnet is the first in Anthropic’s upcoming line of 3.5 models, and it surpasses the more expansive Opus 3.0 model in performance while consuming a fraction of its energy. This emphasis on compute efficiency is becoming crucial in AI system design as the cost of powering and cooling AI data centers skyrockets with the infrastructure reaching gigawatt-scale.
Anthropic highlights the remarkable speed of Claude 3.5 Sonnet, noting it operates twice as fast as Claude 3 Opus. This speed boost, coupled with cost-effective pricing, makes Claude 3.5 Sonnet an excellent choice for complex tasks like context-sensitive customer support and multi-step workflow orchestration.
The new model has achieved impressive benchmark results in three standardized tests: graduate-level reasoning with GPQA, undergraduate-level knowledge with MMLU, and coding proficiency with HumanEval. It outperformed Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro, Meta’s Llama-400b, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4o, though not by a huge margin, typically only by a couple of percentage points.
Anthropic promotes Sonnet 3.5 as its “strongest vision model yet.” It excels at a range of vision-based tasks, including interpreting charts and graphs or transcribing text from imperfect image sources like screenshots or scanned receipts, surpassing Opus 3.0 in accuracy by 6 to 17 points across industry-standard vision benchmarks.
The new model also demonstrates enhanced humor handling and more lifelike conversation capabilities. Sonnet will be the first Anthropic AI to offer the Artifacts feature to users. Instead of generating images or code snippets directly into the conversation flow, Artifacts create this content in a dedicated space alongside the chat. This enables users to establish a “dynamic workspace where they can see, edit, and build upon Claude’s creations in real time, seamlessly integrating AI-generated content into their projects and workflows,” according to Anthropic.
Anthropic also revealed that Claude will soon support team collaboration, allowing companies to store their data, documents, and projects in a single, centralized repository with Claude acting as an on-demand assistant.
You can explore Claude 3.5 Sonnet for free today on the Claude.ai website and the Claude iOS app. While a Claude Pro or Team subscription provides significantly higher rate limits. Third-party integration is also available through the Anthropic API, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Cloud’s Vertex AI.
Claude Haiku 3.5 and Opus 3.5 are scheduled for release later this year.
