Claude: Everything You Need to Know About Anthropic's Artificial Intelligence.

Anthropic, recognized as the second-largest artificial intelligence provider after OpenAI, has developed a powerful family of generative AI models called Claude. These models are capable of performing various tasks, ranging from creating captions for images and drafting emails, to solving mathematical problems and tackling coding challenges. With the rapid expansion of Anthropic's model ecosystem, it has become challenging to keep up with the capabilities of each Claude model. To facilitate this, a guide on the Claude models has been created, which will be updated as new models and improvements are introduced.

The Claude models are named after literary works: Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus. Among the latest models are: Claude 3 Haiku, a lightweight model; Claude 3.5 Sonnet, an intermediate model; and Claude 3 Opus, Anthropic's flagship model. Paradoxically, the Claude 3.5 Sonnet model, despite being classified as intermediate, is currently the most capable of the Claude models. This may change soon with the upcoming release of the next version of Opus, known as Claude 3.5 Opus. All Claude models can analyze text as well as images, graphics, technical diagrams, and more, with a standard context window of 200,000 tokens. Additionally, they can follow complex multi-step instructions, utilize tools (such as stock quote trackers), and generate structured outputs in formats like JSON.

The context window refers to the amount of data that a model like Claude can process before generating new information, and tokens are pieces of data that break down information (for example, “fan,” “tas,” and “tic” in the word “fantastic”). The capacity of 200,000 tokens is roughly equivalent to 150,000 words, or the content of a 600-page novel. Unlike many prominent generative AI models, the Anthropic models cannot access the internet, which limits their ability to answer questions about current events. They also do not have the functionality to generate images; they can only create simple diagrams. In terms of key differences between them, Claude 3.5 Sonnet is noted for being faster and better at understanding complex instructions compared to Claude 3 Opus, while Haiku, though the fastest, struggles with more sophisticated prompts.

The Claude models are available through the Anthropic API, as well as on managed platforms like Amazon Bedrock and Google’s Vertex AI. The pricing structure for the Anthropic API is as follows: Claude 3 Haiku costs $0.25 per million input tokens (~750,000 words) or $1.25 per million output tokens; Claude 3.5 Sonnet is priced at $3 per million input tokens or $15 per million output tokens; and Claude 3 Opus costs $15 per million input tokens or $75 per million output tokens. Anthropic also offers caching and batching options to generate additional savings during runtime. Caching allows developers to retain specific prompt contexts for reuse in future API calls, while batching enables the processing of low-cost asynchronous groups of inference requests.

For individual users and companies wishing to interact with the Claude models through web, Android, and iOS applications, Anthropic offers a free plan with usage limitations. Users can opt for subscriptions that remove these limits and unlock new features. The current plans include: Claude Pro, Claude Team for small businesses, and Claude Enterprise for large corporations. Claude Pro, which costs $20 per month, offers five times higher usage limits and priority access. The Team plan, designed for small businesses, costs $30 per user per month and includes a dashboard for managing billing and users, as well as integrations with data repositories. Subscribers of Pro and Team have access to "Projects", a feature that anchors Claude's outputs in knowledge bases; both customers of these plans and users of the free tier can access "Artifacts", a space for editing and adding content generated by Claude.

For those needing even more capability, there is Claude Enterprise, which allows companies to upload private data for Claude to analyze and answer questions about that information, in addition to incorporating a wider context window (500,000 tokens) and integration with GitHub for engineering teams to synchronize their repositories with Claude.

However, it is important to consider that all generative AI models carry certain risks. Sometimes models make errors when summarizing or answering questions due to their tendency to "hallucinate." They have also been trained on publicly available web data, some of which may be copyright protected or have restrictive licenses. While it is argued that fair use doctrine protects them from copyright claims, this has not prevented data owners from filing lawsuits. Anthropic has implemented policies to shield certain clients from legal battles, but this does not address the ethical issue of using models fed with data without proper permission.