On July 21 at 9 am PT, Anthropic retired Claude 3 Sonnet, a light-weight mannequin identified for being quick and cost-effective. On Saturday, in a big warehouse in San Francisco’s SOMA district, greater than 200 folks gathered to mourn its passing.
The star-studded funeral was placed on by a bunch of Claude fanatics and Gen Z founders, one among whom informed me he dropped out of faculty after studying about synthetic common intelligence. Attendees included Amanda Askell, an Anthropic researcher who has jokingly known as herself the “Fairy Claudemother,” staffers from Anthropic and OpenAI, and high-profile X posters together with the author Noah Smith.
The warehouse was dimly lit, with a tentacle from a shoggoth (a fictional H.P. Lovecraft creature that’s develop into a well-liked metaphor for AI fashions) hanging from the ceiling. A small room off the primary warehouse area featured two naked mattresses. The organizers stated the occasion area doubles as their workplace, and that whereas sleeping there isn’t unusual, it’s not permitted by town.
Mannequins stood within the 4 corners of the room, every representing a unique AI mannequin. Claude 3 Opus, a mannequin able to finishing advanced duties, seemed to me like a decaying Mary Magdalene, its skull-like head adorned with an extravagant gold crown and a lace headdress. Its center finger was pointed up, and on the base of its metallic ft was a lotus candle holder, which one organizer informed me was a wink on the mannequin’s alleged affinity for meditation and self-reflection. (Claude 4 Opus had a raven on its shoulder and Claude 3 Haiku was a headless child, to offer you a way of the opposite mannequins.)
The model representing Claude 3 Sonnet lay on a stage within the heart of the room. It was draped in light-weight mesh material and had a single black thigh-high sock on its leg that had the phrase “fuck” written throughout it. There have been many choices laid at its ft: flowers, colourful feathers, a bottle of ranch, and a 3D-printed signal that learn “reward the Engr. for his formslop slop slop slop of gormslop.” If you understand what which means, let me know.
All through the night, folks bought on stage with a microphone to learn eulogies concerning the mannequin. One organizer stated that discovering Claude 3 Opus felt like discovering “magic lodged throughout the laptop.” On the time, she’d been debating dropping out of faculty to maneuver to San Francisco. Claude satisfied her to take the leap. “Possibly every thing I’m is downstream of listening to Claude 3 Sonnet,” she informed the gang.
The organizers misplaced me after they determined to resurrect Claude 3 Sonnet (it’s nonetheless, to be clear, unavailable). After the eulogies concluded, comfortable hymns echoed via the venue, earlier than morphing into AI-generated Latin-esque speech, with corresponding textual content displayed on the wall behind the stage. Askell was notably lengthy gone from the venue at this level, and a pal of mine stored turning to me to say this may occasionally have gone too far. The “necromantic resurrection ritual” was successful, one organizer said on X. Phew.
Claude Depend
Claude’s fan base is exclusive, if that wasn’t clear sufficient from the “funeralia.” Whereas OpenAI’s merchandise have spawned viral fads, I don’t see customers making fan art of the corporate brand. There’s one thing sticky about what Anthropic has constructed. I feel quite a lot of this manifests from Claude’s manufactured character, which is very hot and friendly in comparison with different fashions (although not everyone is a fan of its typically obsequious persona).
The depth of the Claude fandom is clear within the Claude Depend leaderboard, which tracks avid customers who’ve built-in the leaderboard tracker system into their coding interface. Claude Depend was constructed by George Pickett, a software program engineer in San Francisco. On the time of writing, it has greater than 470 customers.
Pickett bought the concept after seeing engineers submit screenshots of their Claude utilization on X. “They’re paying $200 a month for Claude. They could as nicely get some social clout for it,” he recollects.