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Google/Anthropic Up the AI Ante with Claude 3 LLM that 'Outperforms Its Peers'

• By David Ramel
• 03/04/2024

Anthropic upped the AI ante with a new version of its advanced AI foundational model, Claude 3, which was promptly parked on Google's Vertex AI cloud service.

At a dizzying pace, cloud giants Google, Amazon and Microsoft and their partners have been taking turns releasing AI systems based on their latest/greatest large language models (LLMs) that sport ever-increasing performance numbers, so expect more of the same.

In this case, Anthropic debuted three levels of model size/sophistication, claiming in a March 4 announcement that its most advanced system "outperforms its peers on most of the common evaluation benchmarks for AI systems."

That system would be Opus, and those peers would be GPT-4 and GPT-3.5 from Microsoft partner OpenAI, along with Google's own Gemini.

Google's Vertex AI announcement summarized the three offerings:

• Claude 3 Opus: Anthropic's most capable and intelligent model yet.
• Claude 3 Sonnet: Anthropic's best combination of skills and speed.
• Claude 3 Haiku: Anthropic's fastest, most compact model.

Claude 3 Sonnet can be tried out at Anthropic's Claude site, but the AI doesn't know that yet because when asked to summarize Claude 3 it said:

Unfortunately, I don't have any information about a product or version called "Claude 3". I am an AI assistant named Claude, created by Anthropic, but I don't have details about different versions of myself. Could you provide some more context about what you're asking? I'd be happy to try summarizing it if I have relevant information in my knowledge base.

So Google provided its own summary:

Compared to earlier iterations of Claude, both Claude 3 Opus and Sonnet offer superior reasoning across complex tasks, content creation, scientific queries, math, and coding, while Haiku is Anthropic's fastest and most cost-effective model. All Claude 3 models boast improved fluency in non-English languages, as well as vision capabilities that unlock tasks ranging from image metadata generation to insights extraction across PDFs, flow charts, and a diverse range of other formats.

Google said Sonnet is available now via API in its Vertex AI Model Garden to users who request private access. Access to the other models will come soon.

Anthropic, meanwhile provides API access to Opus and Sonnet now, with Haiku becoming available soon. Prices are listed in its announcement.

Google said Claude 3 models in Vertex AI will provide new options for users to:

• Accelerate AI development with quick access to Claude's pre-trained models through simple API calls in Vertex AI.
• Focus on applications, not infrastructure as Claude models are offered in Vertex AI as managed APIs — meaning customers can concentrate on building groundbreaking applications instead of worrying about backend complexity or the management overhead of underlying infrastructure.
• Optimize performance and costs by leveraging flexible auto-scaling and pay-only-for-what-you-use pricing to optimize costs as needs grow. And of course, leverage world-class infrastructure, purpose-built for AI workloads.
• Deploy responsibly with Google Cloud's built-in security, privacy, and compliance as Vertex AI's assortment of models and tools are offered with Google Cloud's enterprise-grade security, privacy, and compliance for generative AI.

As Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, Amazon and other major AI players are surely right now working on their own LLM updates, Anthropic said it is already planning to do the same.

"We do not believe that model intelligence is anywhere near its limits, and we plan to release frequent updates to the Claude 3 model family over the next few months," the company said. "We're also excited to release a series of features to enhance our models' capabilities, particularly for enterprise use cases and large-scale deployments. These new features will include Tool Use (aka function calling), interactive coding (aka REPL), and more advanced agentic capabilities."

Update: After this article was published, Amazon informed us that Claude 3 is available on Amazon Bedrock: "Amazon Bedrock is currently the only managed service to offer Claude 3 Sonnet as generally available. Opus and Haiku will be available soon." Learn more here.