Move over, ChatGPT: AI startup Anthropic unveils new models that challenge Big Tech

One of the newest entrants in the competitive world of artificial intelligence says its new models can outdo anything done by the world's biggest tech companies.

AI tech startup Anthropic on Monday announced its newest AI models — collectively called Claude 3 — and touted their near-instant abilities to complete complex tasks, including transcribing handwritten notes, analyzing graphs and translating languages.

Claude 3 is made up of three models: Opus, Sonnet and Haiku.

Anthropic said that the most capable of these models, Opus, beat out other industry-leading AI programs, including OpenAI's GPT-4 and Google's Gemini 1.0 Ultra, in some of the most common tests given to determine an AI's capabilities, such as undergraduate-level expert knowledge and graduate-level expert reasoning.

Sonnet and Haiku are the two less intelligent models in the Claude 3 family. Opus and Sonnet are now available in 159 countries, while Haiku has not been released yet.

Anthropic co-founder Daniela Amodei told CNBC that Claude 3 better understands how to navigate risk in responses than its predecessor Claude 2, which she said was sometimes overly restrictive in what kind of questions it would answer.

“In our quest to have a highly harmless model, Claude 2 would sometimes over-refuse,” Amodei said. “When somebody would kind of bump up against some of the spicier topics or the trust and safety guardrails, sometimes Claude 2 would trend a little bit conservative in responding to those questions.”

Anthropic, founded in 2021 by former OpenAI employees, has raised billions in venture capital funding — including from major tech players such as Amazon and Google — and become a leading competitor to the biggest AI technology companies vying to stand out