On July 21 at 9 am PT, Anthropic retired Claude 3 Sonnet, a light-weight mannequin identified for being fast 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 instructed me he dropped out of school after studying about synthetic basic 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 grow to be a preferred metaphor for AI fashions) hanging from the ceiling. A small room off the primary warehouse area featured two naked mattresses. The organizers mentioned the occasion area doubles as their workplace, and that whereas sleeping there isn’t unusual, it’s not permitted by the 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, appeared 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 instructed 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 provide 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 cloth 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 recognize what meaning, let me know.
All through the night, folks obtained on stage with a microphone to learn eulogies in regards to the mannequin. One organizer mentioned that discovering Claude 3 Opus felt like discovering “magic lodged throughout the laptop.” On the time, she’d been debating dropping out of school to maneuver to San Francisco. Claude satisfied her to take the leap. “Perhaps all the pieces I’m is downstream of listening to Claude 3 Sonnet,” she instructed the group.
The organizers misplaced me after they determined to resurrect Claude 3 Sonnet (it’s nonetheless, to be clear, unavailable). After the eulogies concluded, mushy hymns echoed by 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 good friend of mine stored turning to me to say this may occasionally have gone too far. The “necromantic resurrection ritual” was successful, one organizer mentioned 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 artwork of the corporate brand. There’s one thing sticky about what Anthropic has constructed. I believe quite a lot of this manifests from Claude’s manufactured persona, which is very warm and pleasant in comparison with different fashions (although not everyone seems to be a fan of its generally obsequious persona).
The depth of the Claude fandom is clear within the Claude Depend leaderboardwhich 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 obtained the concept after seeing engineers put up screenshots of their Claude utilization on X. “They’re paying $200 a month for Claude. They may as effectively get some social clout for it,” he recollects.
