Anthropic, a startup backed by Alphabet and Amazon.com, released updated artificial intelligence models on Tuesday, along with a new ability to automate computer tasks and save users from typing buttons.
The new “computer usage” feature can tell AI “where to move the mouse, where to click, what to type, to perform complex tasks,” Anthropic Chief Science Officer Jared Kaplan said in an interview.
The ability is designed for software developers and represents a move towards AI agents, programs that require minimal human intervention to perform multiple steps. Researchers have proposed agents as the frontier of AI development beyond chatbots, which easily include prose or computer code though not actions.
Anthropic demonstrated a use case for the feature that included coding a basic website, and another that used various programs including Google Search and Apple Maps to schedule sunrises.
Anthropic offers software developers three versions of Claude, its family of AI models, at prices that vary based on their functionality. This week’s updates come to the Sonnet, the mid-range model, and the Haiku, the cheapest.
The new 3.5 Haiku can generate computer code “almost comparable” to the version of Sonnet released in June, according to Kaplan. CEO Dario Amodei told Reuters at the time that the company intended to update the Opus, the most capable model, by the end of the year.
The computing feature is currently limited to the new version of Claude 3.5 Sonnet and comes with safeguards to prevent its use for spam, fraud and election-related abuse, Anthropic said. Kaplan said AI still makes mistakes.
Mike Krieger, the Instagram founder who joined Anthropic this spring as chief product officer, said the company is seeking feedback from business customers to learn where to focus development of the feature. Meanwhile, the lab team within Anthropic is exploring how to make the capability available to consumers, something Krieger says he’s looking for.
“I was booking flights,” he said. “I want this to be completely automatic.”
On Monday Microsoft launched an application for its customers to create their own agents that can handle inquiries, identify sales leads and manage inventory.