Anthropic's release of Claude 3.5 Sonnet changes the cost-performance curve for building AI products. The key takeaway is that we now have a model with intelligence that outperforms the previous top-tier Claude 3 Opus, but operates at twice the speed and a significantly lower cost. This makes it the new default workhorse for complex, multi-step agentic systems where latency and cost have been blocking factors.
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Claude 3.5 Sonnet is the first model in Anthropic's new 3.5 family. It's positioned as a mid-tier model by name, but its performance benchmarks exceed the previous high-end model, Claude 3 Opus, on graduate-level reasoning (GPQA) and coding proficiency (HumanEval).
The model is available through the Anthropic API, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Cloud's Vertex AI. The pricing is set at $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens, with a 200K token context window. This price point is substantially cheaper than Claude 3 Opus, making it more accessible for high-throughput applications.
Critically, it operates at twice the speed of Claude 3 Opus. This combination of higher intelligence, lower cost, and reduced latency makes it ideal for tasks like context-sensitive customer support and orchestrating multi-step workflows.
