— What was recently at the frontier is now cheaper and faster. Five months ago, Claude Sonnet 4 was a state-of-the-art model, writes Anthropic. — Today, Claude Haiku 4.5 gives you similar levels of coding performance, but at one-third the cost and more than twice the speed.
Continue reading “Anthropic launches Haiku 4.5; twice the speed at a third of the cost”
The model comes hot on the heels of Opus 4.1, the launch of file creation and Claude for Chrome, which all seem to be included in this release.
Continue reading “Anthropic announces Claude Sonnet 4.5, Claude Code gets top requests”
Microsoft is in a complex business relationship with OpenAI, where the early investor gets access to the latest AI tech and OpenAI gets access to computing power. They have just reached a “non-binding memorandum of understanding (MOU) for the next phase of our partnership.” This could allow OpenAI to go for-profit, under the control of a non-profit entity said to retain an ownership stake of more than $100 billion. Many takes on this today, but OpenAI has been moving away from Microsoft for funding, operations and cloud computing lately. The final deal will likely include some kind of a new investment in the now $500 billion company, and may unlock further market opportunities for OpenAI.
More at: OpenAI and Microsoft’s joint statement, x.com announcement, Reuters, Axios.
OpenAI goes to the movies
A new animated a-list movie, «Critterz» is under development using «OpenAI’s resources.» It should be ready for the Cannes Film Festival, meaning production time will be drastically sped up to only nine months. The script is written by part of the team from «Paddington in Peru», and it is spearheaded by Chad Nelson, who is a creative specialist at OpenAI. The technique looks to be to feed drawings to a large language model and have it animate them. The movie therefore streamlines animation, but wont skimp on voice actors, Gizmodo writes.
More at: The Wall Street Journal, Gizmodo and Engadget.
Read on for more news!
If you supply it with the data, like sales reports or statistics, Claude can now use its own sandboxed computer and coding access to provide you with well presented, clean data in file form.
Continue reading “Anthropic’s Claude can now create advanced files for you”
The epic class action lawsuit concerned a library of 7 million pirated books used in training, and had Anthropic looking at $150,000 in penalties per instance of copyright theft, but it was settled last week without disclosing terms.
Continue reading “Anthropic’s copyright settlement to cost $1.5 billion or more”
The company has just finished a «Series F» fundraising round of $13 billion at a valuation of $183 billion, which will «expand our capacity to meet growing enterprise demand, deepen our safety research, and support international expansion as we continue building reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems,» Anthropic writes.
Continue reading “Anthropic is now a 183 billion dollar company”
This applies to all private users, and if you opt in, your chats will be used not only for training future models, but to improve the safety of the current ones:
— We’re now giving users the choice to allow their data to be used to improve Claude and strengthen our safeguards against harmful usage like scams and abuse, Anthropic writes.
Continue reading “Anthropic starts training models on new Claude chats”
Claude for Chrome is «the next logical step,» writes Anthropic, after connecting Claude to calendars, documents and emails.
— We view browser-using AI as inevitable, they go on, and cite the large portion of work being done in the browser interface.
Continue reading “Anthropic slips out Claude for Chrome, warns against prompt injection hacks”
The center of the suit was Anthropic’s library of 7 million pirated books in their training data, that could carry a penalty of $150,000 per infringement — and as a class action case, a loss would entail damages for every single author.
An unfavorable ruling would therefore be debilitating to Anthropic, and send dark clouds across the industry, likely forcing them toward a settlement.
Continue reading “Anthropic settles «historic» class action copyright case brought by authors”
— We remain highly uncertain about the potential moral status of Claude and other LLMs, now or in the future, Anthropic says in their post on the issue.
Continue reading “Anthropic lets their chatbots turn off conversations due to «model welfare»”
Robby Starbuck rose to fame as an influencer campaigning against Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) in the USA. He often sued companies to force them to end such policies, and even sued Meta after their AI wrongly implicated him in the events of January 6.
Now the suit is settled and he has a new job offer; as a Meta advisor to address «ideological and political bias» in their AIs. This is what Trump meant when he went against «woke» AI, and Meta says they have made «tremendous strides to improve the accuracy of Meta AI and mitigate ideological and political bias» since working with Starbuck.
More at The WSJ, The Verge, Mashable and MSNBC.
Gemini now defaults to remembering previous chats
Google Gemini’s new feature is always on by design, and will remember your older chats without specifically asking. The feature delivers «more personalized responses the more you use it,» Google says. It will remember «key details and preferences you’ve shared, leading to more natural and relevant conversations, as if you’re collaborating with a partner who’s already up to speed.»
It can be turned off by going to Settings, then «Personal context.» There is also an option called «Temporary Chats» that won’t be remembered.
More at Google’s launch post, The Verge and 9to5Google.
After the launch of Opus 4.1 last week, they have been working at a «fast clip,» to compete with Google and OpenAI, The Verge writes.
Continue reading “Anthropic’s busy week; launches memory, longer context and $1 govt plans”
In an incremental update that got lost in this week’s headlines, Opus has been «improved across most capabilities» relative to the 4.0 version. It now scores 74.5% on SWE-bench Verified, almost as good as GPT-5. Windsurf says the performance gains are similar to going from Sonnet 3.7 to 4. It’s available now and costs the same as Opus 4.0. Users are also noting a significant improvement.
Google says people are still clicking
After a Pew Research report said users are less likely to click on from AI Overviews in Google, the entire publisher scene erupted and saw doom and gloom on the horizon. They were already seeing fewer clicks from Google in their logs. Now, Google is trying to counter with a happy blog post claiming average click quality has actually increased, and that they are in fact sending more «quality clicks» to publishers than before. Not stats, studies or other underpinning for that, though.
Continue reading “Quick Friday news roundup: Opus 4.1, Grok undresses Taylor Swift, and more”
But here’s the truth: None of these numbers are easy to verify — and each company counts differently.
Continue reading “So, who really has the most GPUs in the AI race?”
Executive order coming on «Woke AI»
The US President is planning a new Executive Order regarding balance in AI models. They are going to have to incorporate more right-wing ideology in order to remain in contention for government contracts.
The order would «dictate that AI companies getting federal contracts be politically neutral and unbiased in their AI models.» No news yet on who will be the arbiter of what is «neutral,» but we can guess, right?
More on The Wall Street Journal, discussion on r/singularity
Anthropic copyright case moves to class action
While Anthropic’s use of purchased books in training was ruled «fair use» by U.S. District Judge William Alsup in late june, their archive of 7 million pirated books was not.
In this phase of the trial, Alsup has okayed it proceeding as a class action suit, on behalf of all pirated authors.
At a maximum penalty of $150,000 for each infringement, that could total a competely debilitating bill if Anthropic is found guilty, and greatly impact the AI industry.
More at Reuters.
Perplexity gets huge India boost
The AI search engine has sealed a deal to give 360 million customers of the Airtel telco their Perplexity Pro service for free. Airtel is the second largest telecoms operator in India. The trial lasts a year and comes with no strings attached, and offers access to ChatGPT models along with Claude Sonnet and Opus 4. It would normally cost $200 per year.
Previously, Google has offered Gemini for free for all students in India, as everyone is trying to capture the enormous market.
More at India Dispatch, TechCrunch, and a press release by Airtel.
Zuckerberg explains «Superintelligence» hires
The Meta CEO just announced a 5GW data center with even more to be built, some the size of Manhattan, in a push worth «hundreds of billions.» In a recent interview with The Information, he explained his reasoning on his expensive AI hires — by saying infrastructure investments pale in comparison to human costs. And, he says, his new hires «want the fewest number of people reporting to them — and the most GPUs.»
See the interview here (25 minutes), and Business Insider on talent motivations.