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Anthropic, the company behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT competitor, Claude, has launched its updated version of the Haiku model. The model, dubbed 3.5 Haiku, is now available via their own service, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Cloud’s Vertex AI.
Claude 3.5 Haiku can apparently beat OpenAI’s leading model, GPT-4o, as well as trouncing older models of Anthropic’s AI. The additional boon to the software is that it’s much cheaper to run. A running concern in the artificial intelligence space is that the cost of running these various models is ever-rising.
Recently, Microsoft began to move into utilizing nuclear power for its data centers and Meta had its nuclear plans scuppered by a rare bee.
Haiku brings a price increase, despite the developers stating it is cheaper to run. This is due to its supposed increase in “intelligence”. As AI language models like Claude are improved, the expectation was that the costs would come down.
Anthropic has bucked this trend, with some saying it has said the quiet part out loud.
Wow they said the quiet part loud there… https://t.co/G7VaJdr1eY
— Jeremy Howard (@jeremyphoward) November 5, 2024
The price increase brings Haiku from $0.25 per million input tokens to $1. Per million output tokens have been raised from $1 to $5. This is a massive price increase for how large language models operate and what they can produce.
It’s estimated that every four characters is a token, with the million tokens coming to around 750,000 words. However, this can vary between models.
If you’re using 3.5 Haiku for its allegedly better coding abilities, you could burn through your million output tokens very quickly. If you input a PDF or file, this also counts against your input tokens.
Claude Haiku 3.5 price hike could open the floodgates
The price increase has ruffled feathers online. X users have been blasting the changes. One user said, “You’re supposed to scale price with compute costs, not intelligence.”
Another posted a meme of Shaq and Charles Barkley, saying “Aw man, we don’t wanna see this.”
AI price hikes are an ongoing concern, as industry veteran Ed Zitron, who writes the Where’s Your Ed At newsletter pointed out. Speaking about OpenAI, which operates very similarly to Anthropic, he pointed out that “OpenAI is more than likely charging only a small percentage of what it likely costs to run its models”.
The fear is that this trend will continue across the board, with Anthropic’s price hike only a drop in the water.
Featured image: Adobe Stock, Adobe Firefly, Anthropic, Flickr
