Claude 3 \ Anthropic vs Galactica

Claude 3 is Anthropic's third-generation large language model family, released in March 2024. It includes three tiers: Haiku for speed and cost, Sonnet for balanced performance, and Opus for the highest reasoning depth. Each model targets a different tradeoff between intelligence, latency, and price.

The family handles text, code, analysis, and vision tasks. Claude 3 models process photos, charts, graphs, and technical diagrams. They support a 200K token context window at launch, with inputs exceeding 1 million tokens available to select customers. Opus and Sonnet launched on claude.ai and the Claude API in 159 countries, with Haiku following shortly after.

Anthropic built Claude 3 with Constitutional AI safety methods and Responsible Scaling Policy guardrails. The models are available through the Claude API, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Cloud Vertex AI. Sonnet powers the free tier on claude.ai, while Opus is available to Claude Pro subscribers.

Five open-weight checkpoints from 125M to 120B parameters give researchers a science-trained language model built from 106 billion curated tokens across 48 million papers, textbooks, encyclopedias, and knowledge bases. Galactica stores, combines, and reasons across modalities including LaTeX, Python code, SMILES formulas, and amino acid sequences inside one decoder-only Transformer architecture. Meta's Papers with Code team open sourced the weights for researchers who want to study how language models organize scientific knowledge.

General-purpose LLMs train on broad web crawls where social chatter can dominate the token budget. Galactica used only curated open-access science sources, which the paper argues lets it train for multiple epochs without overfitting. Meta removed the public web demo three days after launch in November 2022 when critics showed confident but fabricated citations and equations, so today you download checkpoints from Hugging Face rather than chat through a hosted interface.

Machine learning researchers can reproduce benchmark numbers from the arXiv paper, including 77.6% on PubMedQA and 52.9% on MedMCQA dev. Computational biologists and chemists can test protein annotation and molecule tasks through Galactica's specialized tokens for amino sequences and SMILES strings. Graduate students exploring scientific QA, citation prediction, or math word problems can experiment with sizes up to 120 billion parameters without training from scratch.