Anthropic has launched its latest AI model, Claude 3.5 Haiku, this week, but at a price four times higher than its previous version. “We have increased the price of Claude 3.5 Haiku to reflect its increased intelligence,” the company stated on Twitter, highlighting that in tests conducted, the model outperformed its predecessor Claude 3 Opus in several technical aspects.
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Subscribe (it's FREE) ►The criticisms of the price increase have not been long in coming. For example, a Twitter user responded the following to the company’s post: “It’s your economic model that competes against other economic models, why would you make it less competitive?” Mckay Wrigley, developer of TakeOffAI, also commented on the social network that the price increase could generate backlash, and suggested that the company simply “say it’s more expensive” without trying to justify it.
The new Claude 3.5 Haiku now costs $1 per million input tokens and $5 per million output tokens, compared to the 25 cents and $1.25 of the previous version. This makes it a more expensive alternative than some low-cost models on the market, such as Google’s Gemini 1.5 Flash or OpenAI’s GPT-4o mini.
In an interview with Ars Technica, researcher Simon Willison noted the disappearance of Claude 3.5 Opus and the price increase of Haiku since its launch. Willison stated that Anthropic might be opting to make their advanced models more exclusive, although the price difference with other economical options remains notable.
However, although Claude 3.5 Haiku offers longer texts and more recent training data, the new model no longer supports image analysis, a feature widely used in previous versions. According to Alex Albert from Anthropic, the previous model will remain available for those who need these functionalities and a more economical price. It is important to note that Claude 3.5 Haiku is only available in the Anthropic API and on platforms like AWS Bedrock, and it is not listed on the Claude.ai website.
