Papers Explained 181: Claude

6 min readAug 8, 2024

The Claude 3 model family, announced by Anthropic, introduces three advanced models: Claude 3 Haiku, Claude 3 Sonnet, and Claude 3 Opus. Each successive model offers increasingly powerful performance, allowing users to select the optimal balance of intelligence, speed, and cost for their specific application.

Opus: The most intelligent, excelling in tasks requiring expert knowledge and reasoning, basic mathematics, and complex comprehension.
Sonnet: Offers a balance between intelligence and speed, suitable for rapid response tasks.
Haiku: The fastest and most cost-effective, capable of quickly processing dense information.

1. All Claude 3 models show increased capabilities in analysis and forecasting, nuanced content creation, code generation, and conversing in non-English languages like Spanish, Japanese, and French.

2. The Claude 3 models have sophisticated vision capabilities on par with other leading models.

3. Claude 3 models show fewer unnecessary refusals, understanding context better and avoiding refusals of harmless prompts.

4. Opus demonstrates a twofold improvement in accuracy over Claude 2.1 on challenging questions and reduced incorrect answers. Future updates will enable citations for verifying answers.

5. The models initially support a 200K context window, with the capability to process over 1 million tokens for select customers. They exhibit near-perfect recall, with Opus surpassing 99% accuracy on the ‘Needle In A Haystack’ benchmark.

Claude 3.5 Sonnet

Claude 3.5 Sonnet, the first release in the Claude 3.5 model family, raises the industry standard for intelligence by outperforming competitor models and the previous Claude 3 Opus across various evaluations. It offers the speed and cost efficiency of the mid-tier Claude 3 Sonnet, making it an exceptional choice for complex tasks such as context-sensitive customer support and multi-step workflows.

Sets new benchmarks in graduate-level reasoning (GPQA), undergraduate-level knowledge (MMLU), and coding proficiency (HumanEval).
Excels in understanding nuance, humor, and complex instructions, and produces high-quality content with a natural, relatable tone.
Solved 64% of problems in an internal agentic coding evaluation, compared to 38% by Claude 3 Opus.
Can independently write, edit, and execute code with advanced reasoning and troubleshooting capabilities.
Handles code translations efficiently, useful for updating legacy applications and migrating codebases.
Surpasses Claude 3 Opus in standard vision benchmarks, particularly in tasks requiring visual reasoning, such as interpreting charts and graphs.
Accurately transcribes text from imperfect images, beneficial for retail, logistics, and financial services.

[22 Oct 2024]

This version includes improved coding, reasoning, and tool use capabilities.

Computer Use

Claude 3.5 can use computers i.e. it can when run through the appropriate software setup, follow a user’s commands to move a cursor around their computer’s screen, click on relevant locations, and input information via a virtual keyboard, emulating the way people interact with their own computer.
The development of computer use models builds upon tool use and multimodality. This involved training Claude to interpret images of computer screens and reason about how to use software tools to perform tasks. A crucial aspect of the training involved teaching to accurately count pixels for issuing precise mouse commands, as the model needs to determine how many pixels to move horizontally or vertically to click on the correct location.

Claude 3.5 Haiku

Claude 3.5 Haiku is the next generation of Claude 3 Haiku. For the same cost and similar speed as Claude 3 Haiku, Claude 3.5 Haiku improves across every skill set and surpasses Claude 3 Opus, the largest model in the previous generation, on many intelligence benchmarks.

Claude 3.7 Sonnet

Claude 3.7 Sonnet is the first hybrid reasoning model. It combines quick responses with extended, step-by-step thinking visible to the user, offering flexibility and control over the thinking process.

Controllable Thinking Budget: Users can specify a maximum token limit for the model’s thinking process (up to the output limit of 128K tokens), allowing for a trade-off between speed/cost and answer quality.
Focus on Real-World Tasks: Optimized for practical applications rather than solely focusing on competition benchmarks. This is reflected in its strong performance in coding and front-end web development.
Improved Coding Capabilities: Demonstrates significant improvements in handling complex codebases, advanced tool use, planning code changes, full-stack updates, and generating production-ready code.
Claude Code Integration: Introduces Claude Code, a command-line tool for agentic coding, allowing developers to delegate engineering tasks directly from their terminal. This tool is currently in limited research preview.
GitHub Integration: Allows developers to connect their repositories directly to Claude, enhancing its understanding of their projects and improving its ability to assist with coding tasks.

Claude 3.7 Sonnet achieves state-of-the-art performance on SWE-bench Verified, which evaluates AI models’ ability to solve real-world software issues.

Claude 3.7 Sonnet achieves state-of-the-art performance on TAU-bench, a framework that tests AI agents on complex real-world tasks with user and tool interactions.

Claude 3.7 Sonnet excels across instruction-following, general reasoning, multimodal capabilities, and agentic coding, with extended thinking providing a notable boost in math and science.

The performance of Claude 3.7 Sonnet versus its predecessor model on the OSWorld evaluation, testing multimodal computer use skills.

Claude 3.7 Sonnet’s performance on questions from the 2024 American Invitational Mathematics Examination 2024, according to how many thinking tokens it’s allowed per problem.