Anthropic Just Announced Its Most Advanced AI Model Yet. These Are Its Top Use Cases

Anthropic just raised the bar for AI. Again. The AI startup, which was founded by a team of former OpenAI researchers in 2021, has announced Claude 3.5 Sonnet, the first in its upcoming 3.5-era line of generative AI models. Anthropic says the new model is significantly smarter and cheaper than its current most powerful model, Claude 3 Opus, not to mention twice as fast. It has clear use cases for IT, customer service, and financial services. In a blog post introducing the new model, Anthropic wrote that Claude 3.5 Sonnet sets new industry benchmarks, outperforming OpenAI's flagship model, GPT-4o, at graduate-level reasoning and coding proficiency. The company also claims the new and improved Claude shows "marked improvement in grasping nuance, humor, and complex instructions, and is exceptional at writing high-quality content with a natural, relatable tone." So, how can businesses take advantage of Claude 3.5 Sonnet's power? Anthropic says that when given the relevant tools, the model can help IT teams "independently write, edit, and execute code with sophisticated reasoning and troubleshooting capabilities." Need to update an older application that's starting to show its age? You could use Claude 3.5 Sonnet to help migrate your codebase. Another potential use case is financial analysis. Anthropic says that Claude 3.5 Sonnet "enables financial institutions and fintech companies to quickly identify patterns, extract insights, and make data-driven decisions for investment strategies, risk assessment, and personalized financial advice." Claude 3.5 Sonnet also represents a leap forward for Anthropic's AI-powered vision capabilities, especially when it comes to tasks that require visual reasoning, like interpreting charts and graphs. The model outperformed GPT-4o at answering questions about the visual contents of charts, documents, and science diagrams. Anthropic says the model can also accurately transcribe text from imperfect images, which the company calls a "core capability for retail, logistics, and financial services, where AI may glean more insights from an image, graphic or illustration than from text alone." Anthropic also announced Artifacts, a new feature that marks "Claude's evolution from a conversational AI to a collaborative work environment." Going forward, when a user asks Claude to generate a piece of content like a snippet of code, an image, or a document, a dynamic workspace opens in a window next to the chatbot. In the near future, whole teams and eventually whole organizations will be able to use this workspace to "see, edit, and build upon Claude's creations in real-time, seamlessly integrating AI-generated content into their projects and workflows." As for how Artifacts could be used by businesses, Anthropic says app developers can use the feature to incrementally build and refine code; design teams can use it to collaboratively create and refine user interfaces and experiences; and legal teams can use it to analyze contracts and iterate on legal agreements. James Clough, CTO of legal AI startup Robin AI, said in a statement that Claude 3.5 Sonnet has improved the speed and accuracy of the company's AI-powered contract reviews, allowing legal professionals to focus on strategy while AI handles analysis. Clough added that Sonnet outperformed GPT-4o in Robin's internal testing "and is exactly the sort of leap forward we need to keep demonstrating value to our customers." One other use case suggested by Anthropic? Journalism. The company says that "journalists and editors can use Artifacts to brainstorm, outline, and draft well-researched, engaging stories with Claude's assistance in gathering information and providing feedback." (Professional journalists may very well disagree with that claim.) The other members of the Claude 3.5 model family, the smaller and cheaper Claude 3.5 Haiku, and the larger and more expensive Claude 3.5 Opus, will both be released later this year. Other features in the planning stages include a sense of memory, so that Claude will remember its prior interactions with a user, and the ability for Claude to search the web. The company says its aim is to "substantially improve the tradeoff curve between intelligence, speed, and cost every few months." In a statement, Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei said that Anthropic's goal is to develop an AI system that can "work alongside people and software in meaningful ways," and that new features like Artifacts are early experiments in this direction. "We're committed to improving Claude's capabilities regularly," Amodei said, "always with a focus on features that address real business needs."