Anthropic Claude 3.5 Sonnet is here, and it’s free

Anthropic, the AI startup that claims to differentiate itself from its peers as a responsible AI firm, launched a new AI model — Claude 3.5 Sonnet. This is the first model in its anticipated Claude 3.5 series and the company claims it surpasses current industry standards in AI intelligence.

Anthropic is offering Claude 3.5 Sonnet for free on Claude.ai and the Claude iOS app, while it would allow Claude Pro and Team plan subscribers to access it with significantly higher rate limits. Claude 3.5 Sonnet is also available via the Anthropic API, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Cloud’s Vertex AI.

This announcement builds upon Anthropic’s previous releases — Claude 3 Haiku and Claude 3 Opus.

“Claude 3.5 Sonnet is now available for free on Claude.ai and the Claude iOS app, while Claude Pro and Team plan subscribers can access it with significantly higher rate limits,” an Anthropic announcement noted.  “It is also available via the Anthropic API, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Cloud’s Vertex AI.”

More power, less cost

Anthropic claimed that Claude 3.5 Sonnet surpasses competitor models like GPT4.o and Gemini 1.5 Pro, Meta’s Llama 3 400B, and even its predecessor, Claude 3 Opus, on a wide range of evaluations. Notably, the Claude 3.5 Sonnet achieves this leap in performance while maintaining the speed and cost-effectiveness of their mid-tier model, the Claude 3 Sonnet.

“The Claude 3.5 Sonnet represents a significant advancement in large language models, featuring notable improvements across key metrics,” said Prabhu Ram, head of the Industry Intelligence Group at CyberMedia Research. “It boasts double the processing speed of its predecessor, Claude Opus, at a fraction of the cost.”

Claude 3.5 Sonnet sets new industry benchmarks for graduate-level reasoning (GPQA), undergraduate-level knowledge (MMLU), and coding proficiency (HumanEval), Anthropic said. “It shows marked improvement in grasping nuance, humor, and complex instructions, and is exceptional at writing high-quality content with a natural, relatable tone.”

The company claimed that Claude 3.5 Sonnet operates at twice the speed of Claude 3 Opus. This performance boost, combined with cost-effective pricing, “makes Claude 3.5 Sonnet ideal for complex tasks such as context-sensitive customer support and orchestrating multi-step workflows.”

As per the announcement, the new model costs $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens, with a 200K token context window.

In April the company launched Claude 3 Haiku as the most cost-effective AI solution with a fee of $0.25 per million token for input and $1.25 for output.

In terms of power and efficiency, Anthropic offers three versions of its Claude AI model — Haiku is the lightweight version while Sonnet and Opus are the middle and high-end models respectively.

Claude 3.5 Haiku and Claude 3.5 Opus are slated for release later this year, the announcement said.

Coding and vision capabilities get a boost

The announcement highlights Claude 3.5 Sonnet’s prowess in code manipulation and understanding. In an internal evaluation, the model solved 64% of problems related to bug fixing and functionality additions with open source codebases, a significant improvement over Claude 3 Opus’ 38% success rate.

“Our evaluation tests the model’s ability to fix a bug or add functionality to an open source codebase, given a natural language description of the desired improvement,” the announcement read. “When instructed and provided with the relevant tools, Claude 3.5 Sonnet can independently write, edit, and execute code with sophisticated reasoning and troubleshooting capabilities. It handles code translations with ease, making it particularly effective for updating legacy applications and migrating codebases.”

Claude 3.5 Sonnet also sets new standards for visual reasoning tasks, surpassing Claude 3 Opus in interpreting charts and graphs and accurately transcribing texts from imperfect images.

“Claude 3.5 Sonnet is our strongest vision model yet, surpassing Claude 3 Opus on standard vision benchmarks,” Anthropic claimed. This capability is particularly crucial for industries such as retail, logistics, and financial services, where visual data holds more insights than text.

Collaborative work environment gets a new name: Artefacts

Alongside Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Anthropic has launched a new feature called Artefacts on Claude.ai. This feature allows users to generate content such as code snippets, website designs, text documents, which appear in a dedicated window alongside their conversation. This creates a dynamic workspace where users can see, edit and build upon Claude’s creations in real-time, marking a significant evolution from conversational AI to a collaborative environment.

“This preview feature marks Claude’s evolution from a conversational AI to a collaborative work environment,” Anthropic stated in the announcement. “It’s just the beginning of a broader vision for Claude.ai, which will soon expand to support team collaboration.”

Soon, teams — and eventually entire organizations — will be able to securely centralize their knowledge, documents, and ongoing work in one shared space, with “Claude serving as an on-demand teammate.”

This feature marks a shift in Claude’s role, evolving from a conversational AI to a collaborative work environment.

The company is also developing new modalities and features to support more business use cases, including integrations with enterprise applications and personalized features like Memory which will enable Claude to “remember a user’s preferences and interaction history,” the announcement said.