Claude 3.5 Sonnet Released: Faster Than Opus with Better Coding

Anthropic just released Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and it's not a typical incremental update. This mid-tier model now outperforms the previous flagship Claude 3 Opus on most benchmarks while running twice as fast. That's a significant shift in the capability-to-speed tradeoff. ## What Changed Claude 3.5 Sonnet delivers improvements across every major capability: **Graduate-Level Reasoning** - 59% on GPQA (graduate-level science questions) - Claude 3 Opus scored 50.4% - Handles complex multi-step reasoning better **Coding Performance** - 64% on HumanEval (up from 38.4% in Claude 3 Sonnet) - 93% on internal agentic coding evaluation - Better at debugging and code explanation **Visual Analysis** - Improved chart and graph interpretation - Better text extraction from images - More accurate visual reasoning **Speed** - 2x faster than Claude 3 Opus - Operates at cost tier of Claude 3 Sonnet - Same pricing structure as before ## Why This Matters The typical pattern with AI models: you choose between capability and speed. Want the best performance? Use the flagship model and accept slower responses. Need speed? Drop down to a smaller model and accept worse outputs. Claude 3.5 Sonnet breaks that pattern. It's faster than the previous best model and better at most tasks. **For API users**, this means you can upgrade to better performance without changing your cost structure or timeout settings. **For interactive work**, the speed improvement is immediately noticeable. Responses that took 15-20 seconds with Opus now take 7-10 seconds. ## Coding Improvements The coding performance jump is substantial. Claude 3.5 Sonnet scored 64% on HumanEval, compared to 38.4% for Claude 3 Sonnet and 38% for GPT-4. **What this means in practice:** Better code generation from natural language descriptions. More accurate bug detection. Improved explanations of complex code. More reliable refactoring suggestions. Anthropic's internal agentic coding evaluation (where the model independently writes, debugs, and tests code) showed 93% task completion. That's higher than any publicly announced AI coding benchmark. ## Visual Analysis Upgrades Claude 3.5 Sonnet handles visual inputs significantly better than previous versions. **Specific improvements:** - Transcribing text from imperfect images - Interpreting charts, graphs, and diagrams - Extracting information from infographics - Understanding visual context in images For business applications, this means more reliable document analysis, better data extraction from screenshots and scanned documents, and improved analysis of visual presentations. ## Available Now Claude 3.5 Sonnet is available immediately: **Web Interface**: Free users and Claude Pro subscribers can access it at claude.ai. Select "Claude 3.5 Sonnet" from the model picker. **API Access**: The model is available via the Anthropic API as `claude-3-5-sonnet-20240620`. Pricing remains at Claude 3 Sonnet levels: $3 per million input tokens, $15 per million output tokens. **Existing integrations**: If you're using Claude via API, update your model parameter to the new endpoint. No other code changes required. ## What to Expect Next This is the first release in the Claude 3.5 family. Anthropic indicated Claude 3.5 Haiku and Claude 3.5 Opus are coming later this year. That suggests further improvements across the model lineup. ## Quick Takeaway Claude 3.5 Sonnet delivers flagship-level performance at mid-tier speed and cost. The coding improvements alone make it worth testing for technical workflows. If you're using Claude 3 Opus, try switching to 3.5 Sonnet - you'll likely get better results faster.