Anthropic, an AI company positioning itself as the ethical and responsible alternative to OpenAI, has unveiled its new generative AI model, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which competes with OpenAI’s GPT-4o in terms of intelligence, speed, and vision capabilities. Anthropic offers a range of models within its family, with Claude Sonnet being the middle child that combines speed and performance for everyday tasks. Meanwhile, Claude Haiku is the lightest and fastest model, and Claude Opus is designed for complex math and coding tasks. According to Anthropic, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, an advanced version of Claude 3 Sonnet, surpasses Claude 3 Opus in intelligence.
When it comes to benchmark comparisons, which have become standard for evaluating AI models, Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet outperforms GPT-4o, Gemini 1.5 Pro, and Llama in categories such as reasoning and coding. It even beats GPT-4o in graduate-level reasoning and matches it in undergraduate-level knowledge. However, the differences between models are marginal, so for the average user handling everyday tasks, the variation may not be noticeable.
While AI advancements have slowed down recently, leading AI scientist Gary Marcus points out that there is evidence of convergence rather than continued exponential growth in the field. As a result, although Claude 3.5 Sonnet may be considered advanced compared to other models available, it may not appear significantly different to users.
One notable feature of Claude 3.5 Sonnet is its vision capabilities. Similar to GPT-4o, this model can interpret charts, graphs, and images, transcribe text from images, and understand visuals. A demo showcased the model transcribing data from genome sequencing milestones and generating a chart and slideshow presentation for a genomics class. However, the free version of Claude 3.5 Sonnet has limitations on daily usage and capacity, which may affect its ability to process certain visual inputs.
It is worth mentioning that Claude 3.5 Sonnet does not generate images like OpenAI’s DALL-E 3. This cautious approach by Anthropic could be due to concerns about the potential misuse of AI-generated images. Anthropic emphasizes its commitment to detecting and mitigating prohibited uses of its technology to prevent the creation of abusive, deceptive, or misleading content. Despite this limitation, users have praised Claude 3.5 Sonnet for its speed and coding abilities, providing a positive user experience.
Overall, Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet presents itself as a competitive alternative to OpenAI’s GPT-4o, offering similar capabilities while positioning itself as an ethical and responsible choice in the AI landscape.
