Claude3: A new, free LLM that's as good as ChatGPT4/Gemini Advanced

If you pay, it can handle a million tokens!

I’ve been recommending for a while that if you can afford it, you must use either ChatGPT4 (the paid version of OpenAI’s LLM) or Gemini Advanced (the paid version of Google’s offering). For those who don’t want to pay for this, now there’s a new contender, Claude3, and it is free (up to 4000 tokens).

Anthropic has released Claude3, their latest model, available to all, and it is in the same class as ChatGPT4 and Gemini Advanced—i.e. the best available on the market today (i.e. 7 March 2024).

The good news is that unlike ChatGPT4 and Gemini Advanced (which are only available as paid services), a version of Claude3 is available as a free service with an Anthropic account. The free version is limited to 4000 tokens, which is good enough for many tasks.

Here, for example, I asked Claude3 to solve a multiple-choice question without giving it the question itself. In other words, I just gave it the five options of an MCQ and told it to guess what the question was and then answer it.

If you have a CS background, you’ll see that Claude3 did an admirable job of this. (So did ChatGPT4 and Gemini Advanced.)

Can your humans do this?

Anyway, the paid version of Claude3 can handle 200k tokens, and if you get an enterprise account, you get a mind-boggling million tokens at a time. Google’s Gemini 1.5 (still in private beta, not yet available generally) also handles a million tokens. With these, you can do crazy things like upload an entire novel and ask it to answer a specific question related to one sentence in the middle of the novel.

The 3rd Chinese curse is coming true: May you live in interesting times!