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Last week, Anthropic released a new version of their Claude model. Claude 3 comes in three flavors:
Sonnet and Opus should be available to try on Chatbot Arena. They also have a vision model that I haven't tried, custom frontends haven't gotten a handle on that yet.
More curiously, Anthropic, the company famously founded by defectors from OpenAI who thought their approach was too unsafe, seems to have realized that excessive safetyism does not
sellmake a very helpful assistant - among the selling points of the new models, one is unironically:From my brief experience this is not mere corpospeak: the new models are indeed much looser in terms of filtering and make noticeably less refusals, and people consistently get away with minimalistic jailbreaks/prefills for unPC, degen-adjacent or CHIM-pilled (lmao) content. This was quite unexpected for me and many others who, considering how barely-usable 2.1 was without a prefill and a decent jailbreak (all this via API of course, the official ChatGPT-like frontend is even more cucked), expected Anthropic to keep tightening the screws further until the model is 100% Helpful-Harmless-Honest by virtue of being totally unusable.
Instead, Claude 3 seems like a genuinely good, very much usable model. Sonnet and especially Opus went a long way to fix Claude's greatest weakness - its
retardationsubpar cognitive abilities and attention focusing - with Opus especially being almost on par with GPT-4 in terms of grokking and following instructions, able to run scenarios that were previously too instruction-heavy for it. Seeing as Claude 2 already had a much higher baseline writing quality than the mechanical prose of Geppetto (to the point many jailbreaks for it served to contain the mad poet's sesquipedalian prose), with the main flaw somewhat corrected it, while not a decisive GPT-4 killer, should now be a legitimate contender. Looking forward to trying it as my coding assistant.OOC aside: Forgive most of my examples being RP-related, I am after all a waifutech
engineerenthusiast. That said, I still think without a hint of irony that roleplay (not necessarily of the E kind) is a very good test of an LLM's general capabilities because properly impersonating a setting/character requires a somewhat coherent world model, which is harder than it sounds, it is very obvious and - for lack of a better term - "immersion-breaking" whenever the LLM gets something wrong or hallucinates things (which is still quite often). After all, what is more natural for a shoggoth than wearing a mask?This has not gone unnoticed, even here, and judging by the alarmed tone of Zvi's latest post on the matter I expect the new Claude to have rustled some jimmies in the AI field given Anthropic's longstanding position. Insert Kenobi meme here. I'm not on Twitter so I would appreciate someone adding CW-adjacent context here, I'll start by shamelessly ripping a hilarious moment from Zvi's own post. The attention improvements are indeed immediately noticeable, especially if you've tried to use long-context Claude before. (Also Claude loves to throw in cute reflective comments, it's its signature schtick since v1.2.)
Either way the new Claude is very impressive, and Anthropic have rescued themselves in my eyes from the status of "naive idiots whose idea of fighting NSFW is injecting a flimsy one-line system prompt". Whatever they did to it, it worked. I hope this might finally put the mad poet on the map as a legitimate alternative, what with both OpenAI's and Google's models doubling down on soy assistant bullshit as time goes on (the 4-Turbo 0125 snapshot is infamously unusable from the /g/entlemen's shared experience). You say "arms race dynamics", my buddy Russell here says "healthy competition".
I've had a reasonable amount of hands on time with Claude Opus, and I would rate it as indistinguishable from GPT-4 in terms of usefulness, or at least I can't tell any obvious disparities after tens of thousands of tokens of conversation.
It is still however, more of a prude, at least as compared to GPT-4. I asked it to try extending an excerpt from a chapter from my novel, and it categorically refused because it included scenes of "body horror". GPT-4 didn't care.*
This is an improvement over Claude 2, or 2.1, but only because those were beaten into nigh uselessness.
(I'm ever curious as to when an AI can write fiction in my style as well as I can, because then I'm going to fucking retire, but that day is not today. Best guess is 1-2 years.)
In other words, I think Claude 3 isn't really a breakthrough (barring the long context window, and no degradation in quality with it according to needle in the haystack assessment, if you need it), but at least there is a legitimate GPT-4 competitor out there. I'd love to evaluate Gemini Ultra myself, but I'm not going to pay for it, but so far GPT-4 being about two years old if counting from completion of initial training, suggests that OAI still has a massive lead and they'd be retarded if they squandered it.
What excites me more than Clod (a less deserved nickname now, admittedly) or Gemini themselves is that they'll likely prompt OAI to launch the next GPT, be it something called 4.5 or an outright 5. Or at least do it sooner instead of milking 4 I guess.
Edit: Mf hasn't even heard of my book, though it should be within the knowledge cutoff in late 2023. Guess they're not scraping Royal Road or it's too niche to remember.
*I've evaluated it in other ways, and once again my takeaway is "GPT-4 parity". That includes applied Bayesian Reasoning and arcane questions about orbital mechanics and megastructures. I had both GPT-4 and Claude Opus crosscheck each other, and they both concluded the other was doing a good job.
So, if I'm only going to pay for one, ChatGPT4 or Opus, is it worth switching from ChatGPT4?
Not really. I haven't run into any task that Opus could perform but GPT-4 couldn't, at least in a reasonable amount of testing. And the latter is more flexible IMO, at least in terms of content guidelines, even if neither is perfect on those grounds.
ChatGPT paid certainly has more perks like DALLE and customs GPTs and plug-ins , depending on how you value those. But the core product, in the form of the intelligence and competency of the AI assistant, is much the same so I wouldn't change if one wasn't significantly cheaper.
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