Claude 3 vs GPT 4: Is Claude better than GPT-4?

Only recently has AI research finally led to the appearance of natural language models with truly sophisticated capabilities. So much so that we have numerous professional generative AI integration services that help bring AI into our own products and companies.

We all remember the crazy popularity of ChatGPT when it first came out. Now we’re at GPT-4, and the movement has spawned numerous LLMs that are seemingly even better than the trailblazer itself. One of them is Anthropic’s Claude. 

We’ve done our research and would like to present you with a detailed comparison between these two state-of-the-art models. They both represent not only the most modern AI advances but also slightly different approaches to it. 

The following Claude vs GPT 4 comparison focuses both on traditional benchmarks as well as some community opinions. Enjoy!

Anton Parkhomenko

AI & No-code Solutions Architect at Merge

Claude 3 vs GPT 4? Which one’s better? Which one do you prefer?

It depends on the task. Claude is ten times better than GPT-4 for text generation, basically for anything that needs text creativity, especially in non-English languages. GPT-4 is better for structured data, code generation, reasoning, and logic. But always verify results, as both can hallucinate.

What about the new GPT-4.0?

It’s still not better than Claude 3.0 Sonnet in working with text. However, while Claude 3.0 is better for text work, GPT-4.0 is superior as a multimodal model. A multimodal model processes various data types, like images, voices, and texts, much faster than Claude.

OpenAI GPT 4: the trailblazer

GPT-4 is OpenAI's latest and most advanced language model, with a major leap forward in artificial intelligence's ability to understand and generate human-like text. Unlike previous models, which could only handle text inputs, GPT-4 has multimodal capabilities (read more about the newest 4.0 version below).

This AI system is quite versatile, nailing tasks that range from intelligent conversations and answering complex questions to solving challenging academic problems. GPT-4 demonstrates a remarkable range of skills, whether it's creative writing, software programming, or data analysis.

GPT-4 real perks are its ability to follow complex instructions, employ multi-step reasoning, and make logical inferences with remarkable accuracy. 

What’s new with GPT-4.0?

OpenAI has recently released GPT-4.0, the latest iteration of its powerful language model. Its multimodal nature allows it to understand and generate content across different modalities, including text, images, audio, and video. 

GPT-4.0 demonstrates improved reasoning abilities to tackle complex, multi-step tasks and provide context-aware responses. With voice interactions, it detects vocal cues and emotional states to communicate more naturally. 

The model's visual understanding has also been enhanced, enabling it to effectively analyze images, screenshots, and live video feeds.

With better language support and a larger context window, GPT-4.0 delivers more accurate outputs across various applications. While it's not perfect, the latest release brings us even closer to better AI interactions for both businesses and consumers. 

Anthropic Claude 3: the successor

Anthropic Claude 3 is a highly capable AI solution made for many different applications and industries. It comes in three distinct versions - Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku.

Opus is built for demanding tasks like automating processes, providing research help, and analyzing data. Sonnet is more affordable and excels at processing data, making recommendations and predictions, and extracting text from images. For users looking for cost-effective solutions, Haiku is the fastest and most compact option, providing near-instant responses.

All versions of Claude 3 API demonstrate impressive technical abilities. It can understand context and comprehend open-ended prompts like humans. Claude 3 also optimizes logistics, inventory, and knowledge extraction to save costs.

For research and development, Claude 3 assists with tasks like literature review, generating hypotheses, and drug discovery using its advanced capabilities. An upcoming feature will allow citations, increasing trustworthiness.

Here’s a bit more information about each Anthropic Claude 3 version. Find out: a) which Claude-3 model would best suit your needs, and b) is Claude 3 free.

Opus

Claude 3 Opus is the premium, most powerful version designed for highly complex tasks. It has top-tier AI capabilities for advanced vision, analysis, automation, and research. 

What about Claude 3 price? Well, Opus pricing is the highest with $15 per million input tokens and $75 per million output tokens. Its massive 200,000-token context window allows it to work with large amounts of data. 

For now, Opus truly represents what AI is capable of than any other model available. For example, it excels at automating complex workflows across APIs and databases, cutting-edge scientific research like drug discovery, high-level strategic analysis of financials and market trends, and advanced forecasting.

Sonnet

Claude 3 Sonnet is a more affordable yet still extremely capable model. Its pricing of $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens makes it cost-effective for broader usage. 

Like Opus, it has a 200,000 token context window. Sonnet is well-suited for large-scale data processing, applying AI to search and retrieve insights from vast knowledge bases, generating product recommendations and marketing predictions for sales teams, and automated code generation and quality control for developers. While not quite as powerful as Opus, it offers excellent performance and scalability for the price. 

Haiku

The most budget-friendly option is Claude 3 Haiku, which costs just $0.25 per million input tokens and $1.25 per million output tokens. 

Haiku is optimized for accurate language translation, content filtering and moderation of risky text, and extracting structured data from unstructured sources.

Its lower price makes it ideal for cost-sensitive use cases like customer service chatbots, e-commerce inventory management, and processing receipts or invoices. Haiku delivers impressive performance for its price tier.

Claude 3 vs GPT-4: benchmarks

Let’s first review what we’ve gathered from official tests, benchmarks, comparisons, and evaluations of these two models. For Claude 3, Opus was the most widely tested one when it comes to comparisons with GPT’s latest model because of its apparent superiority over its two “brothers”. You can compare all the models from the two companies, even older ones, here.

Strengths and limitations

GPT-4

GPT-4 has a wide-ranging knowledge base and excels in various text-based tasks like writing, summarizing, and answering questions. Its strong conversational skills make it versatile and easy to use. However, it can't handle as much text at once compared to Claude 3, and it performs worse in some technical areas like advanced reasoning and coding.

Claude 3

Claude 3 Opus is really good at complex reasoning and coding tasks. It efficiently uses tokens to give detailed, long responses and can process large documents easily due to its bigger text-handling capacity. However, it only works with text, can't process images or audio, and doesn't have real-time web search capabilities or handle low-resolution images well.

The table below outlines their performance across key benchmarks.

Explanations:

Undergraduate level knowledge

Claude 3 Opus scores slightly higher (86.8%) than GPT-4 (86.4%). Both models are highly competent in basic academic knowledge, but Claude 3 has a slight edge in understanding undergraduate topics.

Graduate level reasoning

Claude 3 Opus scores significantly higher (50.4%) than GPT-4 (35.7%) in graduate-level reasoning, showing it handles complex problems and advanced thinking better. Overall, Claude is more suitable for challenging academic and professional tasks.

Grade school math

Claude 3 Opus scores 95.0%, better than GPT-4’s 92.0%, making it more accurate for elementary math problems. This higher accuracy is useful for educational purposes in grade school math.

Multilingual math

Claude 3 Opus scores 90.7%, much higher than GPT-4’s 74.5%. It shows better performance in solving math problems in different languages, making it more effective for international use.

Coding (HumanEval)

Claude 3 Opus scores 84.9%, significantly higher than GPT-4’s 67.0%. This means Claude 3 is much more reliable for coding tasks and generates more efficient code, which saves developers time and tokens.

Reasoning over text

Claude 3 Opus scores 83.1% compared to GPT-4’s 80.9%, indicating better text understanding and reasoning, which is important for complex text analysis.

Mixed evaluations

Claude 3 Opus scores 86.8%, higher than GPT-4’s 83.1%. Overall, both have consistent performance across varied tasks, making them versatile for different applications.

Knowledge Q&A

Claude 3 Opus and GPT-4 are almost equal in knowledge-based queries, with Claude 3 at 96.4% and GPT-4 at 96.3%. So, both are effective for retrieving accurate information.

Common knowledge

Claude 3 Opus scores 95.4%, slightly better than GPT-4’s 95.3%. It basically has a minor advantage in general knowledge tasks, making it reliable for everyday questions.

Detailed benchmark comparisons

GPT-4o performance on traditional benchmarks

GPT-4o excels in text, reasoning, and coding intelligence, with high scores in multilingual, audio, and visual tasks. It even sets new records in visual perception and general knowledge benchmarks, which showcase its advanced reasoning and comprehensive abilities.

Claude 3 Opus performance on benchmarks

Claude 3 Opus outperforms GPT-4 in complex reasoning and coding benchmarks. It excels in academic benchmarks like GSM-8k for math reasoning, showing it’s better at educational and professional tasks. Its consistent top performance before the release of GPT-4o showed how advanced it can be.

Speed and efficiency

GPT-4o is twice as fast as GPT-4 Turbo and 50% cheaper for developers, perfect for quicker interactions and more cost-effective solutions. It also has higher rate limits, making it more efficient for extensive use. Claude 3, though faster than GPT-4, might not match GPT-4o’s speed and cost benefits. 

Multimodal capabilities

GPT-4o can handle text, images, and audio, enabling diverse tasks like discussing images, real-time voice conversations, and analyzing videos. These features make GPT-4o versatile for various applications. In contrast, GPT-4 focuses on text and images, while Claude 3 is limited to text processing only and lacks multimodal capabilities.

Language support

GPT-4o supports over 50 languages with better quality and speed, making it accessible worldwide. This is an improvement over GPT-4, which supports many languages but not as effectively. Claude 3 supports fewer languages (English, Japanese, Spanish, French), which limits its global usability.

Context window

GPT-4o and GPT-4 can handle up to 128,000 tokens, which is nice for long conversations and documents. Claude 3 Opus, with a larger context window of 200,000 tokens, can process even longer texts, making it better for handling extensive documents and maintaining coherence over long discussions.

Benchmarks: summary

To summarize, Claude 3 (Opus) outperforms GPT-4 in most areas tested, especially complex reasoning and coding tasks, suggesting stronger problem-solving abilities. 

Thanks to its larger 200,000-token context window, Claude excels at tasks requiring nuanced understanding and lengthy responses. GPT performs very well on mathematical and logical problems, likely benefiting from its extensive knowledge base.

Regarding limitations, GPT-4's responses can seem more robotic than those that came from Claude 3 Opus. Additionally, GPT-4 has a smaller token context window, which may prevent it from comprehending and responding to very long texts.

Read more about generative AI in business here.

Claude 3 vs GPT-4: community opinion

Long story short, the community (primarily Reddit and other forums) appears divided. First of all, many people who use AI assistants are split on which is better at coding - Claude 3 or GPT-4. 

Community opinion

Reddit

Claude is still my go to for anything involving a little more context. It's way less lazy. If it's not modifying my code by adding new variables, it's giving me completely new code that I can't plug into my problem. Claude has consistency in responses that is invaluable for coding.

Some like Claude’s Opus more because it gives full code samples with fewer mistakes compared to GPT-4. GPT-4 sometimes ignores instructions or gives code that doesn't work. But others think GPT-4 has improved and may now be better or equal to Opus at coding. GPT-4 finds solutions quickly, they say.

For longer tasks needing lots of context, like summarizing meeting notes, Opus seems to do better. It understands instructions better and remembers context more. GPT-4 has a harder time remembering stuff. GPT-4 works on more types of things, though, like images. And because it's free, GPT-4 is a really good deal.

When it comes to writing stories, many find Opus sounds more natural, like a person, while avoiding made-up info. But GPT-4 can match it if given the right starting points. Overall, experts can't agree on which is better overall. Both have strengths and weaknesses depending on the job.

Many conclude using both is best since what they're good at varies. In general, this debate shows how quickly AI assistants keep getting better at more kinds of questions.

Claude vs GPT: the conclusion

Now that you read all the comparisons and various opinions from the community and our team, here’s the only logical (albeit somewhat boringly obvious) conclusion:

The best model depends on the specific task needed. 

GPT-4 is a versatile model well-suited for general language tasks where time is not critical. Claude 3 specializes in efficiency, longer-form writing, coding, document analysis and situations requiring faster processing speeds.

It will be intriguing to observe each model's development moving forward. 

GPT-4 promises continued growth across modalities, while Claude 3 Opus focuses on transparency and control. Overall, both models showcase impressive language abilities, but current results indicate Claude 3 Opus outmatches GPT-4 in tasks demanding advanced cognitive processing.