AI: Anthropic upgrades Claude AI to 3.5 already. RTZ #394

...LLM AI product upgrade cycles accelerate across the board

The LLM AI innovation and upgrade cycles continue to move at a fast pace in this AI Tech Wave in 2024. Anthropic announced its latest version of its Claude models in version 3.5 Sonnet. And it had just introduced Claude 3.0 back this March.

It comes with features that keep it head to head with LLM AI leader OpenAI’s GPT-4o (Omni), which itself just got upgraded only a few weeks ago with impressive voice features, a day ahead of Google’s latest versions of its Gemini LLM AI models. Anthropic’s investment and Cloud distribution partner Amazon AWS is already featuring the latest model in its Bedrock service for enterprise customers.

Not a day of rest for the leading LLM AI companies, all racing ahead with features and head-to-head performance metrics. As Techcrunch notes in “Anthropic claims its latest model is best-in-class”:

“OpenAI rival Anthropic is releasing a powerful new generative AI model called Claude 3.5 Sonnet. But it’s more an incremental step than a monumental leap forward.”

“Claude 3.5 Sonnet can analyze both text and images as well as generate text, and it’s Anthropic’s best-performing model yet — at least on paper. Across several AI benchmarks for reading, coding, math and vision, Claude 3.5 Sonnet outperforms the model it’s replacing, Claude 3 Sonnet, and beats Anthropic’s previous flagship model Claude 3 Opus.”

“Benchmarks aren’t necessarily the most useful measure of AI progress, in part because many of them test for esoteric edge cases that aren’t applicable to the average person, like answering health exam questions. But for what it’s worth, Claude 3.5 Sonnet just barely bests rival leading models, including OpenAI’s recently launched GPT-4o, on some of the benchmarks Anthropic tested it against.”

“Alongside the new model, Anthropic is releasing what it’s calling Artifacts, a workspace where users can edit and add to content — e.g. code and documents — generated by Anthropic’s models. Currently in preview, Artifacts will gain new features, like ways to collaborate with larger teams and store knowledge bases, in the near future, Anthropic says.”

As CNBC describes it in “OpenAI competitor Anthropic announces its most powerful AI yet”:

“Anthropic also announced “Artifacts,” which it said allows a user to ask its Claude chatbot to, for example, generate a text document or code and then opens the result in a dedicated window. “This creates a dynamic workspace where they can see, edit, and build upon Claude’s creations in real-time,” the company said, adding that it expects Artifacts will be useful for code development, legal contract drafting and analysis, business report writing and more.”

Artifact potentially also bolsters Anthropic’s enterprise product plans, especially supplemented with their recent high-profile executive hire. As the Verge notes,

“Artifacts actually seems to be a signal of the long-term vision for Claude. Anthropic has long said it is mostly focused on businesses (even as it hires consumer tech folks like Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger) and said in its press release announcing Claude 3.5 Sonnet that it plans to turn Claude into a tool for companies to “securely centralize their knowledge, documents, and ongoing work in one shared space.” That sounds more like Notion or Slack than ChatGPT, with Anthropic’s models at the center of the whole system.”

Competitively, this upgrade Anthropic well against OpenAI, Google and other offerings, as CNBC observes:

“As startups like Anthropic and OpenAI gain steam in the generative AI business, they — alongside tech giants like Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta — have been part of an AI arms race to integrate the technology to ensure they don’t fall behind in a market that’s predicted to top $1 trillion in revenue within a decade.”

As I described yesterday, Anthropic is now well placed on the AI Safety and Trust spectrum alongside OpenAI, Google, Apple, and now the latest newcomer, ‘Safe Superintelligence Inc’., founded by ex-OpenAI founder Ilya Sutskever.

As I’ve also outlined, this race on product features and capabilities will continue this year, as all players anticipate OpenAI imminent release of GPT-5 later this year, along with other AI products that I’ve outlined.

So expect this relatively unprecedented rate of AI product and service upgrades to continue this and next year at least, up and down the AI Tech Stack above.

All the while customers both enterprise and consumers, figure out how to use these AI capabilities as the markets go mainstream. Stay tuned.

(NOTE: The discussions here are for information purposes only, and not meant as investment advice at any time. Thanks for joining us here)