Claude 3 \ Anthropic vs Minerva

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.

Minerva is a large language model from Google Research built to solve math and science questions through step-by-step written reasoning. It reads problems that mix plain English with LaTeX notation, then writes out solutions involving arithmetic, algebra, and symbolic steps. The model was trained on scientific papers and web pages where mathematical formatting was kept intact, rather than stripped during preprocessing.

Most math-capable models lean on external tools like Python interpreters or calculators at inference time. Minerva takes the opposite bet: it generates full worked solutions from the model weights alone, using chain-of-thought prompting and majority voting across multiple sampled answers. That informal approach covers a wider range of problem types than formal theorem provers, but the trade-off is answers cannot be machine-verified the way Coq or Lean proofs can.

Researchers studying quantitative reasoning in language models use Minerva as a reference point for STEM benchmark performance. The public sample explorer hosts 110 solved problems across algebra, physics, chemistry, and other topics, so anyone can read through how the model arrived at each answer. Educators and ML engineers reviewing benchmark methodology will find the published MATH, MMLU-STEM, GSM8k, and OCWCourses scores useful for comparing against newer models.