Anthropic Releases Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Makes It Available for Free to All Users

Anthropic released the first entrant in the Claude 3.5 large language model (LLM) family, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, on Friday. The new release comes just three months after the AI firm unveiled the Claude 3 family of artificial intelligence (AI) models. As per the company, the latest AI model can outperform Claude 3 Opus, the most capable model from the previous generation. It also gets a new Artifact feature that will allow users to see a sandbox view when the chatbot is asked to generate code snippets, website designs and more.

Claude 3.5 Sonnet details

According to a newsroom post by the company, the Claude 3.5 Sonnet is now more powerful and cost-efficient than the Claude 3 Opus. As per Anthropic's naming convention, the Haiku model is the smallest, the Sonnet model is placed in the middle, and Opus is the flagship-tier AI model. It is expected that the AI firm will also release the 3.5 Haiku and Opus models in the coming months.

Coming to the new AI model's performance, the Claude 3.5 Sonnet comes with a 200,000 token context window and costs $3 (roughly Rs. 250) per million input tokens and $15 (roughly Rs. 1,254) per million output tokens. The company claims that the latest model can run twice as fast as the Claude 3 Opus model. It scored 88.7 percent in 5-shot (AI was trained on a small number of labelled examples) on the Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) benchmark and 92.0 percent in 0-shot on the HumanEval benchmark.

Anthropic claimed that the Claude 3.5 Sonnet can independently write, edit, and execute code. It also comes with reasoning and troubleshooting capabilities that enable it to perform complex tasks such as code translation. 

Apart from the text and coding-based upgrades, the new AI model also gets improved computer vision. The AI firm claimed that the Claude 3.5 Sonnet can transcribe text from imperfect images, graphics, or illustrations. A new Artifact feature has also been included with the new AI chatbot. It is a sandbox-style preview window that opens when the AI is asked to generate content such as code snippets, text documents, or website designs. Users can see, edit, and build upon Claude's generation.

Coming to safety parameters, Anthropic stated that Claude 3.5 Sonnet remains at ASL-2 (AI Safety Level 2) standard. As per the AI firm's Responsible Scaling Policy, ASL-2 refers to systems that show early signs of dangerous capabilities (such as providing instructions to create a bioweapon) but are not considered useful due to lack of reliability and that the information is already available publicly.

Beyond the safety rating, Anthropic also claimed that it has engaged with external experts to test and improve safety mechanisms with Claude 3.5 Sonnet. The AI model was also provided to the UK's Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute (UK AISI) for evaluation before it was deployed.

Currently, Claude 3.5 Sonnet is available for free on Claude.ai and the Claude iOS app. Subscribers of Claude Pro and Claude Team plans can also access with higher rate limits. Apart from that, it is also available via Anthropic API, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Cloud's Vertex AI.