Enlarge (credit: Anthropic / Benj Edwards)

On Thursday, Anthropic announced Claude 3.5 Sonnet, its latest AI language model and the first in a new series of "3.5" models that build upon Claude 3, launched in March. Claude 3.5 can compose text, analyze data, and write code. It features a 200,000 token context window and is available now on the Claude website and through an API. Anthropic also introduced Artifacts, a new feature in the Claude interface that shows related work documents in a dedicated window.

So far, people outside of Anthropic seem impressed. "This model is really, really good," wrote independent AI researcher Simon Willison on X. "I think this is the new best overall model (and both faster and half the price of Opus, similar to the GPT-4 Turbo to GPT-4o jump)."

As we've written before, benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) are troublesome because they can be cherry-picked and often do not capture the feel and nuance of using a machine to generate outputs on almost any conceivable topic. But according to Anthropic, Claude 3.5 Sonnet matches or outperforms competitor models like GPT-4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro on certain benchmarks like MMLU (undergraduate level knowledge), GSM8K (grade school math), and HumanEval (coding).

Enlarge (credit: DuckDuckGo)

On Thursday, DuckDuckGo unveiled a new "AI Chat" service that allows users to converse with four mid-range large language models (LLMs) from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Mistral in an interface similar to ChatGPT while attempting to preserve privacy and anonymity. While the AI models involved can output inaccurate information readily, the site allows users to test different mid-range LLMs without having to install anything or sign up for an account.

DuckDuckGo's AI Chat currently features access to OpenAI's GPT-3.5 Turbo, Anthropic's Claude 3 Haiku, and two open source models, Meta's Llama 3 and Mistral's Mixtral 8x7B. The service is currently free to use within daily limits. Users can access AI Chat through the DuckDuckGo search engine, direct links to the site, or by using "!ai" or "!chat" shortcuts in the search field. AI Chat can also be disabled in the site's settings for users with accounts.

According to DuckDuckGo, chats on the service are anonymized, with metadata and IP address removed to prevent tracing back to individuals. The company states that chats are not used for AI model training, citing its privacy policy and terms of use.