News

Anthropic Launches Claude 3 AI Models

• By David Ramel
• 03/04/2024

Anthropic on Monday took the wraps off its newest AI foundational model family, Claude 3, with availability via the Google Vertex AI platform.

There are currently three models in this new grouping, with the most advanced, dubbed Opus, "outperform[ing] its peers on most of the common evaluation benchmarks for AI systems," according to Anthropic's announcement.

The next biggest model, Sonnet, is primed for enterprises and "strikes the ideal balance between intelligence and speed. The smallest model, Haiku, is tuned "for near-instant responsiveness."

In a separate announcement Monday, 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.