Claude 4, Matryoshkas Models, & More

TLDR;

Welcome to Thursday’s news rundown for the week. Today, we have the release of a new frontier model, Claude 4, news from OpenAI and Mistral, an interesting way of understanding AI models that will be helpful for your future interactions with them, and what’s to me, the most significant architectural innovation we have seen in quite some time: Google’s Matryoshka models.

Enjoy!

FRONTIER MODELS

Anthropic Drops Claude 4 Opus and Sonnet

Habemus new frontier models. After what appeared to be an endless wait for new models from OpenAI's biggest competitor (in terms of revenue), Anthropic has finally released its latest models: Claude 4 Opus and Claude 4 Sonnet.

What will not be surprising to you at all is that the models set new records in many benchmarks.

However, the models seem to be particularly good at coding and the so-called ‘agentic’ tasks; although they haven’t officially surrendered their fight in search-based products (using AI models to search for data), it’s clearer by the day that they have unofficially given up and now are solely focused on coding and agents (again, agents focused on coding).

Out of all the marketing stuff mentioned by Anthropic, one stands out: these models think for a long, long time, if necessary, to the point that, in some instances, Opus can get to think for up to seven straight hours with no human intervention.

But why is this important?

Simple, in today’s frontier AI models, the so-called reasoning models, thinking time is totally correlated with performance on complex tasks. Therefore, if Claude is the longest thinker around, it should be possible to say it’s the smartest model on the planet.

TheWhiteBox’s takeaway:

As the model was released three hours ago, I can’t really add that much insight. That said, I’ve tried the models for you.

The results are quite promising, as you can see below, where it one-shotted an entire frontend from scratch based on the conditions I set (an application that allows me to communicate with my SQLite local database with SQL calls that are transformed from natural language using OpenAI APIs.)

I specifically asked for Svelte’s framework and tailwind CSS, and the model complied. As you can see in the GIF below, the frontend is fully interactive:

I would just add that the chosen colours are horrendous, but to its credit, I did not specify the color palette and, quite frankly, the prompt could have benefited from extra work on my side, so the result is pretty impressive to me compared to what Gemini 2.5 Pro did in the previous iteration.

For more profound conclusions, we need a few days to let people play with the model for longer to really assess its true quality. That said, we can already confirm that it is not a step-change improvement but an incremental one that allows Anthropic to jump back into the race.

But for how long?

NEWS & INSIGHTS

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