Anthropic releases Claude 3 Haiku, an AI model built for speed and affordability

San Francisco-based startup Anthropic has just released Claude 3 Haiku, the newest addition to its Claude 3 family of AI models. Haiku stands out as the fastest and most affordable model in its intelligence class, offering advanced vision capabilities and strong performance on industry benchmarks.

The release of Haiku comes shortly after Anthropic introduced the Claude 3 model family earlier this month, which includes Claude 3 Opus and Claude 3 Sonnet. Haiku completes the trio, providing enterprise customers with a range of options to balance intelligence, speed, and cost based on their specific use cases.

“If you imagine the business use cases where response time is highly critical, so if you imagine, customer support or any kind of internal chat, Haiku is a great option because they tend to be really high volume, so you can keep the cost down, and instantaneous response is really, really important for those for those businesses,” explained Daniela Amodei, cofounder and president of Anthropic, in a recent interview with VentureBeat.

Tailored for high-volume, latency-sensitive applications

One of Haiku’s key strengths is its speed, with the ability to process 21,000 tokens (approximately 30 pages) per second for prompts under 32,000 tokens. This rapid processing power allows businesses to analyze large volumes of documents, like quarterly filings, contracts, or legal cases, in a fraction of the time it would take other models in its performance tier.

Dario Amodei, cofounder and CEO (and brother of cofounder Daniela Amodei), sees two classes of customers for Haiku: “Latency sensitive and cost sensitive,” he told VentureBeat. “Latency sensitive is usually user-facing, like, when you just want a good UI. Companies know that, if [some tasks] take three seconds to respond instead of one second, they lose a fraction of customers and whatever workflow they’re doing.”

Advanced vision capabilities and enterprise-grade security

In addition to its speed, Haiku boasts advanced vision capabilities, allowing it to process and analyze visual input such as charts, graphs, and photos. This feature opens up new possibilities for enterprise applications that rely heavily on visual data.

“We expect Claude 3 Haiku to be significantly more capable than other models that are priced similarly,” Daniela told VentureBeat. “Another way of thinking about it is that open source models are often very popular because they’re very, very cheap, and we think that Claud 3 Haiku offers a much more capable alternative that also incorporates so many of them prospects, trustworthiness, and reliability and [our] safety principles as well.”

Anthropic has also prioritized enterprise-grade security and robustness in the development of Haiku. The company conducts rigorous testing to minimize the risk of harmful outputs and model jailbreaks, while implementing additional layers of defense like continuous systems monitoring, secure coding practices, and stringent access controls.

Versatility within the Claude 3 family

The release of Claude 3 Haiku comes at a time when enterprise demand for powerful, efficient, and secure AI solutions is at an all-time high. As businesses increasingly turn to AI to streamline operations, improve customer experiences, and gain a competitive edge, models like Haiku are poised to play a crucial role in the adoption and scaling of AI technologies across industries.

“Haiku just might be good enough for some set of use cases—even within one enterprise business, you might see that an enterprise wants to use Claude 3 Opus for various intensive technical research or complex coding, and might want to use Haiku for an internal chat wiki or something like that,” said Daniela Amodei, highlighting the versatility of the Claude 3 family of models.

Anthropic’s Claude 3 family of models, which also includes the recently released Opus and Sonnet, has already set new benchmarks for AI performance across a wide range of cognitive tasks. With the addition of Haiku, the company now offers a comprehensive suite of AI solutions to cater to the diverse needs of enterprise customers.

Claude 3 Haiku is available now through Anthropic’s API and for Claude Pro subscribers on claude.ai. The model will also be coming soon to Amazon Bedrock and Google Cloud Vertex AI, further expanding its accessibility to businesses worldwide.