Anthropic's 3.5 Haiku model now available to all users
But it is four times as expensive as Claude 3 Haiku
The move, which has not been officially announced by the company, is set to enhance the capabilities of its AI chatbot platform, Claude, offering users a more advanced AI experience.
According to Antrhropic, 3.5 Haiku, unveiled in October, is particularly well-suited for real-time tasks that require rapid processing and generation of text, and is adept at tasks such as coding recommendations, data extraction and labelling, and content moderation.
The 200,000-token context window of the model significantly exceeds the 128,000 tokens of OpenAI's GPT-4, enabling Claude 3.5 Haiku to manage extensive inputs.
According to Artificial Analysis, a third-party benchmarking organisation, the model boasts impressive latency figures, with an average time-to-first-token (TTFT) of 0.80 seconds. However, its token generation speed of 65.1 tokens per second places it slightly behind competitors in output speed.
3.5 Haiku can be used with Claude Artifacts, a feature that allows users to create and display formatted results in real-time, alongside the ongoing conversation.
While 3.5 Haiku is a powerful tool, it does have limitations.
Unlike Anthropic's other models, 3 Haiku and 3.5 Sonnet, it lacks image analysis capabilities.
3.5 Haiku comes at a cost
AI companies are looking for ways to recoup the enormous costs of training foundation models.
Last month, Anthropic said in a post that 3.5 Haiku would be priced similarly to 3 Haiku. However, the company later revised its pricing strategy, citing the model's increased "intelligence" as justification for a higher API cost.
"During final testing, Haiku surpassed Claude 3 Opus, our previous flagship model, on many benchmarks — at a fraction of the cost. As a result, we've increased pricing for Claude 3.5 Haiku to reflect its increase in intelligence," Anthropic said.
Starting at $1 per million input tokens and $5 per million output tokens, Claude 3.5 Haiku is now four times as expensive as Claude 3 Haiku, which costs $0.25 per million input tokens and $1.25 per million output tokens.
On the API side, pricing starts at $0.80 per million input tokens and $4 per million output tokens.
The Haiku model is accessible for free through the Claude chatbot, but usage is capped depending on server demand.
Free-tier users typically receive 10 exchanges per day, equating to 20 messages. For those requiring greater capacity, the Claude Pro plan is available at $20 per month, offering up to five times the free tier's usage and additional benefits like priority access during peak hours.
Anthropic's latest AI model comes at a critical time, as AI heavyweights like OpenAI and Google have recently unveiled their own advanced models, such as OpenAI's o1 and o1-mini and Google's Gemini 2.
Earlier this month, OpenAI confirmed a new subscription tier called ChatGPT Pro costing $200 per month, giving unlimited access to all of OpenAI’s models.