Claude Fans Threw a Funeral for Anthropic's Retired AI Model

On July 21 at 9 am PT, Anthropic retired Claude 3 Sonnet, a lightweight model known for being quick and cost-effective. On Saturday, in a large warehouse in San Francisco's SOMA district, more than 200 people gathered to mourn its passing. The star-studded funeral was put on by a group of Claude fanatics and Gen Z founders, one of whom told me he dropped out of college after learning about artificial general intelligence. Attendees included Amanda Askell, an Anthropic researcher who has jokingly called herself the "Fairy Claudemother," staffers from Anthropic and OpenAI, and high-profile X posters including the writer Noah Smith. The warehouse was dimly lit, with a tentacle from a shoggoth (a fictional H.P. Lovecraft creature that's become a popular metaphor for AI models) hanging from the ceiling.