Anthropic’s chatbot Claude 3 emerges as worthy rival to OpenAI’s ChatGPT

Anthropic, the US artificial intelligence start-up backed by Amazon and Google, has introduced its more recent chatbot directly aimed at challenging generative AI leader OpenAI.

The chatbot, Claude 3, offers a “new standard for intelligence” and, according to the San Francisco company, outperforms Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Claude 3 “sets new industry benchmarks across a wide range of cognitive tasks … [its] models are better at following complex, multi-step instructions”, Anthropic said.

“They are particularly adept at adhering to brand voice and response guidelines.”

Claude 3 comprises a family of three large language models (LLMs), the underlying algorithm that uses deep learning and analyses significant amounts of data to generate content.

The LLMs include Haiku, Sonnet and Opus, each offering “increasingly powerful performance, allowing users to select the optimal balance of intelligence, speed and cost for their specific application”.

Anthropic has named Claude 3’s LLMs after artistic works – a haiku is a three-line poem, a sonnet has 14 lines, while an opus is a composition – each offering increased capabilities relative to their definitions.

Haiku can summarise “thousands” of documents into structured data, Sonnet helps in conversation and translating language, while Opus, which “achieves near-human comprehension capabilities”, can act as an economic analyst, the company said.

One example Anthropic gave for Opus is looking up US gross domestic product trends and listing them in a table.

According to Anthropic’s benchmarking statistics – Claude 3 outperforms both Gemini and ChatGPT.

For example, in primary school maths, Opus has 95 per cent, compared to 92 per cent of OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Gemini 1.0 Pro’s 94.4 per cent.

In reasoning over text, those figures are 83.1 per cent, 80.9 per cent and 82.4 per cent, while for common knowledge, they are 95.4 per cent, 95.3 per cent and 87.8 per cent.

Perhaps the most significant statistic is that Claude 3 can summarise up to 150,000 words – compared with ChatGPT’s 3,000.

While some results have Claude 3 winning by a hairline, the consensus is that Opus outperforms ChatGPT and Gemini in every metric.

On the lower end, Sonnet and Haiku also largely outperform GPT-3.5 and Gemini 1.0 Pro.

Compared to its predecessors, Sonnet is two times faster than Claude 2 and Claude 2.1.