Anthropic announced the release of Claude 3.7 Sonnet on Monday, touted as “the first hybrid reasoning model on the market”. Here’s what that means.

According to Engadget (Anthropic’s new Claude model can think both fast and slow, written by Igor Bonifacic and available here), Claude 3.7 Sonnet can both answer a question nearly instantaneously or take its time to work through it step by step. As the user you can decide what approach Claude takes, with a dropdown menu (illustrated above) allowing you to select the “thinking mode” you want it to take.

Nice!

“We’ve developed Claude 3.7 Sonnet with a different philosophy from other reasoning models on the market. Just as humans use a single brain for both quick responses and deep reflection, we believe reasoning should be an integrated capability of frontier models rather than a separate model entirely,” writes Anthropic. “This unified approach also creates a more seamless experience for users.”

Anthropic says it also took a different approach to developing Claude’s reasoning capabilities. “We’ve optimized somewhat less for math and computer science competition problems, and instead shifted focus towards real-world tasks that better reflect how businesses actually use LLMs,” the company writes. To that point, current Claude users can look forward to “particularly strong improvements in coding and front-end web development.”

Claude 3.7 Sonnet is already available to use across all Claude plans, including Anthropic’s free tier. Developers, meanwhile, can access the new model through the company’s API, Amazon Bedrock and Google Cloud’s Vertex AI.

Speaking of developers, Anthropic is also introducing Claude Code, a new “agentic” tool that allows you to delegate coding tasks to Claude directly from a terminal interface. Available currently as a limited research preview, Anthropic says Claude Code can read code, edit files, write and run tests, and even push commits to GitHub.

Want more observations? Here are links to two other articles about Claude 3.7 Sonnet:

• The Verge: Anthropic’s new ‘hybrid reasoning’ AI model is its smartest yet
• TechCrunch: Anthropic launches a new AI model that ‘thinks’ as long as you want

Answering questions quickly or working through them methodically – these models are getting more like us every day! Whether that’s a good thing, I leave up to you. 😁

So, what do you think? Are you excited about Anthropic’s new Claude model? Or not that impressed? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

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