The Anthropic Arms Race: An Overview and Perspectives of the Claude 3 Family of Artificial Intelligence Models and OpenAI’s GPT-4o

The AI arms race continues apace: Anthropic is launching its newest model, called Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which it says can equal or better OpenAI’s GPT-4o or Google’s Gemini across a wide variety of tasks. The new model is already available to Claude users on the web and on iOS, and Anthropic is making it available to developers as well.

Artifacts seem to show the long-term vision for Claude. Anthropic has long said it is mostly focused on businesses (even as it hires consumer tech folks like Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger) and said in its press release announcing Claude 3.5 Sonnet that it plans to turn Claude into a tool for companies to “securely centralize their knowledge, documents, and ongoing work in one shared space.” That sounds like something from a game like Notion or Slack, with the models at the center of the system.

Anthropic’s new model, called Claude 3.5 Sonnet, is an upgrade to its existing Claude 3 family of AI models. It is more adept at solving math, coding, and logic problems as measured by commonly used benchmarks. Anthropic claims that it is quicker and better at understanding language and even has a better sense of humor.

It may be difficult to produce big new leaps in machine intelligence a year after GPT-4 spurred a frenzy of new investment. With GPT-4 and similar models trained on a lot of online data, it is getting harder to find new sources of data. Making models substantially larger, so they have more capacity to learn, is expected to cost billions of dollars. When OpenAI announced its own recent upgrade last month, with a model that has voice and visual capabilities called GPT-4o, the focus was on a more natural and humanlike interface rather than on substantially more clever problem-solving abilities.