Anthropic’s new model and features
Anthropic surprised many with a new model launch last week, releasing a version upgrade to their Claude family just 3-months since their last big update. They launched Claude 3.5 in ‘Sonnet’ form (a supposedly mid-sized model) but a week in, the industry and user response has been universally positive. The model is not only superior to all the other Claude variants, but for many has surpassed Open AI’s GTP-4o to become the ultimate AI on the planet.
Anthropic, despite being seen as the big AI lab with the biggest focus on safety and cautious progress now appear to be pushing the frontier forward faster than anyone. Dario Amodei, Anthropic co-founder, told VentureBeat: “Claude 3.5 Sonnet is now the most capable, smartest, and cheapest model available on the market today.” Its 2x faster than Claude 3 Opus at a 5x lower cost.
The model is particularly strong at coding and vision understand, and we at ExoBrain can vouch for its superhuman coding skills and instant responses. The speed of feedback loops and the scope of what’s possible has dramatically increased with the new version, even if the sophistication of thought remains nearer to Claude 3 Opus levels. Social media has been full of entire games, such as working versions of Doom with auto-generated levels being developed from a single prompt. There has been much speculation on how Anthropic has been able to pull this off, they have likely benefitted from the scale of compute their backers Amazon can provide, increasing the size of the model but also improving efficiency and capability with ever more carefully curated synthetically generated data.
Whilst OpenAI have had to back-track on plans to release their controversial voice mode, Anthropic have also been busy designing new ways to interact. These centre around two interesting new concepts; ‘artifacts’ and ‘projects.’ These feel much more intuitive than the chat thread has felt to date when working on common business tasks. Artifacts get created when you work with the model to write code or a document for examples. Instead of having numerous steps in a conversion with snippets and versions of the collaborative work, the artifact window pops up and allows for the changes to be reflected there as you go. This feels much more organised. OpenAI launched custom GPTs last year, but they have failed to catch-on. Projects is Anthropic’s version of this, but on early testing it feels a more natural approach. A Claude project can have multiple chats, but with special instructions and custom uploaded ‘knowledge’, and the artifacts being worked on in that project can be shared across threads. The approach is not yet perfect, we found in our testing that the model would often forget custom instructions, but early bugs aside, this user experience is going in a very positive direction.
Finally, Anthropic have also broken new ground with a beta their Steering API. This offers a glimpse into the future of AI manipulation by allowing developers to influence the internal features of the language model (much like they demonstrated with their Golden Gate Claude experiment, forcing a version of Claude 3 to become entirely obsessed by the bridge). This opens up new possibilities for customisation and fine-tuning of AI outputs. This could lead to highly specialised AI assistants tailored for specific industries or tasks.
Takeaways: With Claude 3.5, projects and artefacts, we believe Anthropic have the strongest subset of features on the market today. They’re available on the pro plan and we would highly recommend you explore this option. With these new features and plans to release new models every few months, OpenAI, Microsoft and Google should be worried.