Claude 3 \ Anthropic vs Gopher

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.

Gopher is a 280-billion-parameter transformer language model Google DeepMind announced in December 2021. DeepMind trained a family of models from 44 million to 280 billion parameters to study how scale affects text prediction, reading comprehension, fact-checking, and toxic-language detection.

Compared with general-purpose chatbots, Gopher was a research release, not a public app. DeepMind paired the model paper with an ethics taxonomy covering 21 risks across six themes and a separate Retrieval-Enhanced Transformer (RETRO) architecture that pulls passages from an internet-scale index to cut training cost and trace outputs back to sources.

The blog post targets AI researchers studying scaling laws, safety taxonomies, and retrieval-augmented language models. Gopher beat prior models on several Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) categories but still struggled with logical reasoning, common-sense questions, repetition, stereotypical bias, and confidently wrong answers in dialogue tests.