The AI company Anthropic has released a family of chatbots that promise to be the most powerful and responsive commercially available yet. Debuted on Monday, Anthropic’s Claude 3 large language models (LLM) are multimodal, allowing them to process text and image prompts. Anthropic also claims that its most advanced model “outperforms its peers on most of the common evaluation benchmarks for AI systems.”
“All Claude 3 models show increased capabilities in analysis and forecasting, nuanced content creation, code generation, and conversing in non-English languages like Spanish, Japanese, and French,” Anthropic wrote in the announcement.
There are three versions of the Claude 3 models: Haiku, the least advanced but fastest; Sonnet, arguably the most advanced free chatbot available now; and Opus, the “most intelligent model” of the family. Only Sonnet and Opus are currently available on the company’s website, with Opus requiring a paid subscription of $20 a month. Its API is also available for developers.
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The company claims it “exhibits near-human levels of comprehension and fluency on complex tasks” including mathematics, language comprehension, and cognitive reasoning. The model can also handle longer prompts than competitors like ChatGPT or Gemini can—much longer prompts.
Where GPT-4 offers around 8,000 tokens for its context window (the amount of text a chatbot can consider when processing a prompt), Claude 3 Opus has a context window of 200,000 tokens. That means that Claude 3 Opus could process all of Frank Herbert’s Dune, while ChatGPT would only be limited to things like news articles and essays.
“[Claude 3 Opus] can navigate open-ended prompts and sight-unseen scenarios with remarkable fluency and human-like understanding,” Anthropic said. “Opus shows us the outer limits of what’s possible with generative AI.”
The bot also seems to be taking direct aim at ChatGPT and Gemini’s refusal to answer more controversial questions and prompts. Claude 3 gives level-headed responses to queries about hot-button topics like race, abortion, and more. It’s a move that reflects the original goals of Anthropic’s founders—who themselves were former OpenAI employees frustrated with the company’s seemingly lack of safety concern when putting their products to market.
However, the model family doesn’t offer everything. For example, none of the bots can generate images like Gemini and ChatGPT can—though that might be for the best considering Google’s recent hiccups on the matter. Claude also can’t search the internet for information and only has data up to August 2023.
However, with investments from Big Tech giants such as Amazon and even Google, it’s clear that Anthropic has its sights set on becoming one of the biggest players in the AI space. While no one is likely going to dethrone OpenAI and ChatGPT for chatbot dominance quite yet, Anthropic is throwing its hat into the ring—and could prove to be the most formidable challenger yet.
