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Claude Opus 4.1

anthropic.com

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Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#41

Post by epolanski »

biinjo wrote: post #35
jzig wrote: post #10

I'm confused by how Opus is presented to be superior in nearly every way for coding purposes yet the general consensus and my own experience seem to be that Sonnet is much much better. Has anyone switched to entirely using Opus from Sonnet? Or maybe switching to Opus for certain things while using Sonnet for others?

Im on the Max plan and generally Opus seems to do better work than Sonnet. However, that’s only when they allow me to use Opus. The usage limits, even on the max plan, are a joke. Yesterday I hit the limits within MINUTES of starting my work day.

Yeah, you need to actively cherry pick which model to use in order to not waste tokens on stuff that would be easily handed by a simpler model.

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#42

Post by Uehreka »

jzig wrote: post #10

I'm confused by how Opus is presented to be superior in nearly every way for coding purposes yet the general consensus and my own experience seem to be that Sonnet is much much better. Has anyone switched to entirely using Opus from Sonnet? Or maybe switching to Opus for certain things while using Sonnet for others?

> yet the general consensus and my own experience seem to be that Sonnet is much much better

Given that there’s nothing close to scientific analysis going on, I find it hard to tell how big the “Sonnet is overall better, not just sometimes” crowd is. I think part of the problem is that “The bigger model is better” feels obvious to say, so why say it? Whereas “the smaller model is better actually” feels both like unobvious advice and also the kind of thing that feels smart to say, both of which would lead to more people who believe it saying it, possibly creating the illusion of consensus.

I was trying to dig into this yesterday, but every time I come across a new thread the things people are saying and the proportions saying what are different.

I suppose one useful takeaway is this: If you’re using Claude Max and get downgraded from Opus to Sonnet for a few hours, you don’t have to worry too much about it being a harsh downgrade in quality.

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#43

Post by j_bum »

AstroBen wrote: post #34
haaz wrote: post #9

it is barely an improvement according to their own benchmarks. not saying thats a bad thing, but not enough for anybody to notice any difference

I don't think this could even be called an improvement? It's small enough that it could just be random chance

I’ve always wondered about this actually. My assumption is that they always “pick the best” result from these tests.

Instead, ideally they’d run the benchmark tests many times, and share all of the results so we could make statistical determinations.

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#47

Post by zamadatix »

ttoinou wrote: post #21
haaz wrote: post #9

it is barely an improvement according to their own benchmarks. not saying thats a bad thing, but not enough for anybody to notice any difference

That's why they named it 4.1 and not 4.5

When it's "that's why they incremented the version by a tenth instead of a half" you know things have really started to slow for the large models.

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#48

Post by taormina »

Alright, well, Opus 4.1 seems exactly as useless as Opus 4 was, but it's probably eating my tokens faster. Wish they let you tell somehow.

At least Sonnet 4 is still usable, but I'll be honest, it's been producing worse and worse slob all day.

I've basically wasted the morning on Claude Code when I should've just been doing it all myself.

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#49

Post by epolanski »

alrocar wrote: post #44

just ran the LLM to SQL benchmark over opus-4.1 and it didn't top previous version :thinking: => https://llm-benchmark.tinybird.live/

How does running it multiple times performs?

LLMs are non-deterministic, I think benchmarks should be more about averages of N runs, rather than single shot experiments.

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#50

Post by taormina »

jzig wrote: post #10

I'm confused by how Opus is presented to be superior in nearly every way for coding purposes yet the general consensus and my own experience seem to be that Sonnet is much much better. Has anyone switched to entirely using Opus from Sonnet? Or maybe switching to Opus for certain things while using Sonnet for others?

Just more ancedata, but I entirely agree. I can't say that I am happy with Sonnet's output at any point, really, but it still occasionally works, whereas Opus has been a dumpster fire every single time.
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