There’s a new leader, technically, in the race for AI assistant dominance, and it’s Anthropic’s new Claude 3.5 Sonnet. The newly released model outperforms both Gemini 1.5 Pro and ChatGPT-4o across a spectrum of benchmark tests, the company announced on Thursday.
This new iteration of Sonnet is the first in Anthropic’s upcoming line of 3.5 models, and it significantly outperforms the more expansive Opus 3.0 model, and does so at a fraction of the larger model’s energy cost. Compute efficiency is becoming an increasingly important aspect of AI system design, especially as the cost of both powering and cooling AI data centers soars while the infrastructure pushes into the gigawatt range.
“Claude 3.5 Sonnet operates at twice the speed of Claude 3 Opus,” the Anthropic team wrote in a blog post. “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 multistep workflows.”
The new model has reportedly set benchmark results across three standardized tests: graduate-level reasoning with GPQA, undergraduate-level knowledge with MMLU, and coding proficiency with HumanEval. It beat out Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro, Meta’s Llama-400b, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4o, though not by any huge margin and typically only by a couple percentage points.
Sonnet 3.5 is being billed as Anthropic’s “strongest vision model yet. ” It’s capable of performing a number of vision-based tasks — like interpreting charts and graphs or transcribing text from imperfect image sources like screenshots or scanned receipts — more accurately than Opus 3.0. In fact, Sonnet 3.5 beat out Opus 3.0 by anywhere from 6 to 17 points across industry standard vision benchmarks. The new model is also reportedly much more competent at handling humor and can converse in a much more lifelike manner.
Sonnet will also be the first Anthropic AI to offer the Artifacts feature to users. Rather than generate images or code snippets directly into the flow of the conversation, Artifacts will create that content in a dedicated space to the side of the chat. This allows users to create “a dynamic workspace where they can see, edit, and build upon Claude’s creations in real time, seamlessly integrating AI-generated content into their projects and workflows,” the Anthropic team claims. It also announced that Claude will soon support team collaboration wherein a company can store its data, documents and projects in a single, central silo, with Claude acting as an on-demand assistant.
You can try out Claude 3.5 Sonnet today for free on the Claude.ai website and the Claude iOS app (a Claude Pro or Team subscription will garner you significantly higher rate limits). Third-party integration is also available through the Anthropic API, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Cloud’s Vertex AI. Claude Haiku 3.5 and Opus 3.5 are scheduled for release later in the year.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Google DeepMind's AI world model Genie 4 can now build interactive worlds that you can explore and reshape as they run. It also generates ambient sounds, music, and dialogue that respond to your actions.
The new world model builds on Genie 3 with improved realism, more natural human movement, and better simulations of real-world physics. It could eventually help with everything from game development to training robots.
Apple has an incredible talent for making me admire its products while simultaneously questioning what on earth it's thinking with the pricing. This isn't even something as bizarre as a monitor stand, but the audacity for starting a new laptop lineup from $2,000 doesn't surprise me.
The newly announced 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6 is just the latest to showcase this. The funny thing is, I already know that it's going to be a reliable workstation. You get a powerful new 2nm M6 processor, a gorgeous Liquid Retina XDR display, and up to 24 hours of battery life. We were impressed by the M5 MacBook Air, so the high-end M6 powered MacBook Pro definitely won't let us down.