The arrival of Claude 3 in March was the most significant release in the first half of the year (Week 10). For the previous year, GPT-4 had reigned supreme, and OpenAI seemed relatively unassailable, but Claude’s remarkable self-awareness and ability to process entire books in seconds set a new bar. By autumn, Claude 3.5 Sonnet raised the bar again (Week 26). Its superhuman software engineering abilities created a step-change in what individuals were capable of doing in code and new development tools like Cursor took off. Meanwhile an array of talented safety researchers left OpenAI for Anthropic, with the Golden Gate Claude (Week 21) and now Fake Alignment papers being for many the AI research breakthroughs of the year.
As a result. Anthropic’s main challenge has been how to keep up with demand, with Claude’s only negative being restrictive rate limiting. Competition is as intensive as ever, but Claude is holding its own, and whilst rumours of delays and issues with the next release abound, Amazon continue to pour in money and compute (and even Microsoft are rumoured to be considering investing in the next round). Anthropic end the year as the leading AI lab. Claude, beloved by many, has shown how AI can provide huge personal productivity augmentation, a knowledge working partner, and a platform for vital safety research.