Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet Benchmarks Beat GPT-4: What Changed
Claude 3.5 Sonnet outperforms GPT-4 on key benchmarks -technical analysis of improvements and implications for agent builders.
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Max Beech
Head of Content
The News: Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet now outperforms GPT-4 on multiple benchmarks: MMLU (88.7% vs 86.4%), HumanEval coding (92% vs 67%), and instruction following.
Key Improvements:
1. Coding capability leap HumanEval: 92% (Claude 3.5) vs 67% (GPT-4) Agents writing code, API calls, or data transformations benefit significantly.
2. Instruction following Better at following complex multi-step instructions without hallucinating steps.
3. Context coherence 200K token context window with better retention across full context vs GPT-4's 128K.
Implications for Agent Builders:
Switch to Claude 3.5 if:
- Agent writes code or SQL queries
- Long documents (>50K tokens)
- Complex instruction chains
- Cost-sensitive (3x cheaper than GPT-4)
Stick with GPT-4 if:
- Heavily invested in OpenAI ecosystem
- Using GPT-4V (vision) capabilities
- Function calling maturity critical
Real-world test (support agent classification):
- Claude 3.5: 91% accuracy, 1.6s latency, £14/1K queries
- GPT-4 Turbo: 89% accuracy, 1.8s latency, £18/1K queries
Claude wins on all three metrics.
Sources:
- Anthropic Claude 3.5 Announcement