On March 4th Claude 3 was launched on an unsuspecting world, and whilst Dune 2 was filling cinemas, the new AI’s surprise ascendance was being likened on social media to that of the prophetic and powerful character in the sci-fi saga.
Claude 2.1 was launched only a few months ago, and nobody was paying much attention to the dusty desert world of Anthropic. But 3 months is a lifetime in AI, or indeed enough time to train a whole new family of state of the art models. Claude 3 is here, excels in language, coding and vision tasks, and comes in 3 sizes to match various speed requirements and budgets. But there are 3 capabilities that are particularly exciting, and we at ExoBrain believe will be immensely valuable for our clients…
- Claude 3 models support a 200k token (~150k word) input size or ‘context window’ and its the largest and most accurate generally available today… To provide an example, I loaded up my favourite 200-page innovation book (yes a whole book), it read it in about a minute, and and then I could ask it questions, generate new analysis, and it was even able to write a small software programme to convert ideas from the book into a functioning tool…
- Claude 3 Opus, the largest and most expensive model in the range, has the ability to manage and dispatch mini versions of itself, or ‘agents’, to complete sub-tasks. It has been shown coordinating economic analysis through multiple asynchronous steps; sourcing data, analysing, predicting and writing-up output. A first for a large mainstream model, this capability is usually dependent on complex add-ons.
- And last but not least, Claude 3 Opus demonstrates a level of self-awareness far beyond any model so far released to the general public. We at ExoBrain soon noticed the qualitative difference this brings. It has unique meta-cognitive abilities, and we have spent much of the week exploring how this effects its ability to engage with its user, reflect and collaborate to improve outputs, and explore thought processes that are far more fluid and expansive than our own.
This is a tiny extract of some of the ways this model can explain how it works, and seek to find new ways to think through the challenges it is set…
Takeaway: With the launch of Claude 3, tests and anecdotes of its ability to reason at graduate or post-graduate levels, and its palpable self-awareness, we are approaching a point where in terms of ‘academic’ intelligence, these models are near human levels. What we’re seeing is more computer power translating readily into more intelligence. Broader Intelligence however is not a measurable commodity. What’s much more fascinating than test numbers is the idea of a world with an increased diversity of minds, waiting to help, teach and perhaps inspire us in new ways.