Hi Reader,

Here are three things I found interesting in the world of AI in the last week

Anthropic release Claude 3.7 sonnet with thinking - blog post​

Queue happy dev gurgles. Claude 3.5 has been the strongest coding model for a while now, only being edged out slightly by the new thinking models. Now that Claude can think it is on top again. Even without thinking it is still beating o3-mini-high in the aider benchmarks and only slightly behind o1.

I particularly like the way Anthropic have designed the api so you specify the "token budget" that you would like Claude to think with. For example, the aider benchmarks above were set using a 32k tokens budget. With the OpenAI o3 model you had to specify low, medium or high but I always felt a bit in the dark about how much it would actually use.

Anthropic are also taking the position of adding thinking as a feature to a regular model instead of having thinking specific models like r1 or o3. This makes a lot of sense and I hope to see other labs follow a similar approach.

3.7 is a lot better at agentic tasks (booking airline ticket, shopping online, agentic coding etc.) so just by changing a 3.5 to a 3.7 in existing code a whole lot of claude powered agents just got an insta-upgrade. The most notable being Cursor's Composer - happy dev gurgles indeed.

XAI's Grok 3 is very strong - blog post​

It's currently the top of the Chatbot Arena leaderboard and by all accounts is a very strong thinking model. Still not available through the api and pricing hasn't been announced.

xAI has one of the larger gpu clusters with 200k H100 GPUs which is a lot more than most other frontier labs. OpenAI is reported to train frontier models on 10-20k GPUs and xAI was throwing around a lot of "10x more compute than OpenAI". It's notable how quickly they reached parity with leading models but their main innovation seems to be 'edgy AI' with NSFW voice mode and an AI that will roast you.

If you're an X user I do recommend trying out the DeepSearch feature - It's not as good as OpenAI's deep research in my opinion, but it also isn't behind a $200 / month paywall and is a good example of what's capable by AI search agents.

I've noticed my personal search usage has absolutely plummeted in the last couple of months and I have a high level of conviction that AI will dominate search in the years to come.

Keyboard shortcut to open desktop AI app, 4o + search for trivial queries, o3-mini-high + search for moderate ones and deep research for anything extensive is a massive productivity boost. Here is what deep research had to say about grok 3 vs claude 3.7.

Good luck google.

AI creating weird wireless chips with amazing performance - article​

Typically when engineers build chips they build them from the bottom up with known modules that get pieced together. It's easy to understand and reason about but the possibility space is also limited. Researchers gave AI the brief of what they wanted the chip to do and it designed it from scratch without reusing any known modules.

This led to weird chip designs that humans couldn't really understand, but were much more performant. It still needed a human in the loop to catch hallucinations, but I think it is a good reminder of just how alien AI cognition is.

The chess world has known this for a long time, with a couple of decades of AI being stronger than the best human players. I find it interesting when chess players talk about computer moves vs human moves and how the computer moves feel very unnatural, going against human intuition.

It's going to be an interesting (and probably weird) ride for all of us as AI capabilities continue to develop.

cheers,

JV

PS: I have a new codewithjv website and have moved the waitlist for learn to code a little bit there. The course will kick off on March 17, more info coming soon.