Anthropic, the main commercial competitor to OpenAI and Google in closed-source generative artificial intelligence, on Thursday unveiled the latest generation of its large language model (LLM) family, Claude 3.5, starting with its Sonnet model. The startup claims Claude 3.5 Sonnet brings substantial performance improvements on a number of benchmark tests.

Also: Anthropic brings Tool Use for Claude out of beta, promising sophisticated assistants

The Claude family of models is divided into three LLM versions, starting with the simplest, Haiku, proceeding to Sonnet in the middle, and topping off with Opus, which is the most powerful. Impressively, Anthropic claims in its blog post that Claude 3.5 Sonnet surpasses Claude 3 Opus in performance on benchmarks, while costing less to deploy.

Claude 3.5 Sonnet "operates at twice the speed of Claude 3 Opus," Anthropic said. "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 startup claims the AI model demonstrates particular capabilities in writing, editing, and executing program code "with sophisticated reasoning and troubleshooting capabilities."

(An "AI model" is the part of an AI program that contains numerous neural net parameters and activation functions that are the key elements for how an AI program functions.)

Claude 3.5 Sonnet is available for free on Claude's website and in the iOS and Android apps, and via the Pro and Team versions of the subscription products. Those plans have been given higher rate limits for using Claude 3.5 Sonnet. 

The startup plans to release Claude 3.5 Haiku and Claude 3.5 Opus "later this year," Anthropic stated in its blog post.

Alongside the Sonnet 3.5 announcement, Anthropic unveiled Artifacts, which are pieces of a response from the Claude AI model that can be kept alongside the chat thread in a separate window -- or, really, a parallel area of the current window. 

"These Artifacts appear in a dedicated window alongside their [the user's] conversation," Anthropic stated. "This creates 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 startup claims that the introduction of Artifacts makes "Claude's evolution from a conversational AI to a collaborative work environment." Anthropic offered an example: designers using Artifacts to collaborate on samples of user interface designs.

Also: Anthropic launches a free Claude iOS app and Team, its first enterprise plan

"Design and UX teams can use Artifacts to collaboratively create, iterate, and refine user interface and user experience prototypes, leveraging Claude's understanding of design principles and ability to generate visual assets," the company explained.

Artifacts is currently available in preview through the web-based version of Claude.

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