Claude Opus 4.1 • Hacker News Board

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#71

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 6:04 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #60

Am I the only one super confused about how to even get started trying out this stuff? Just so I wouldn't be "that critic who doesn't try the stuff he criticizes," I tried GitHub Copilot and was kind of not very impressed. Someone on HN told me Copilot sucks, use Claude. But I have no idea what the right way to do it is because there are so many paths to choose. Let's see: we have Claude Code vs. Claude the API vs. Cl…

[deleted]

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#72

Post by _vaporwave_ » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 6:06 PM UTC

It's interesting that Anthropic maintains current prices for prior state of the art models when doing a new release. Why offer a model with worse performance for the same price? What incentives are they trying to create?

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#73

Post by ryandrake » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 6:08 PM UTC

olalonde wrote: post #65

ryandrake wrote: post #60

Am I the only one super confused about how to even get started trying out this stuff? Just so I wouldn't be "that critic who doesn't try the stuff he criticizes," I tried GitHub Copilot and was kind of not very impressed. Someone on HN told me Copilot sucks, use Claude. But I have no idea what the right way to do it is because there are so many paths to choose. Let's see: we have Claude Code vs. Claude the API vs. Cl…

Claude Code CLI.

Thanks. With the CLI, can you get Copilot-ish things like tab-completion and inline commands directly in your IDE? Or do you need to copy/paste to and from a terminal? It feels like running a command on the IDE and then copying the output into your IDE is a pretty primitive way to operate.

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#74

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 6:09 PM UTC

_vaporwave_ wrote: post #72

It's interesting that Anthropic maintains current prices for prior state of the art models when doing a new release. Why offer a model with worse performance for the same price? What incentives are they trying to create?

[deleted]

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#75

Post by dysoco » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 6:09 PM UTC

_vaporwave_ wrote: post #72

It's interesting that Anthropic maintains current prices for prior state of the art models when doing a new release. Why offer a model with worse performance for the same price? What incentives are they trying to create?

I'm guessing it's mostly for legacy reasons. When 3.7 came out many people were not happy with it and went back to 3.5; I guess supporting older models for a while makes sense.

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#76

Post by zamadatix » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 6:11 PM UTC

phonon wrote: post #53

zamadatix wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Opus 4 came out 10 weeks ago. So this is basically one new training run improvement.

And in 52 weeks we've gone 3.5->4.1 with this training improvement, meanwhile the 52 weeks prior to that were Claude -> Claude 3. The absolute jumps per version delta also used to be larger.

I.e. it seems we don't get much more than new training run levels of improvement anymore. Which is better than nothing, but a shame compared to the early scaling.

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#77

Post by prinny_ » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 6:13 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #60

Am I the only one super confused about how to even get started trying out this stuff? Just so I wouldn't be "that critic who doesn't try the stuff he criticizes," I tried GitHub Copilot and was kind of not very impressed. Someone on HN told me Copilot sucks, use Claude. But I have no idea what the right way to do it is because there are so many paths to choose. Let's see: we have Claude Code vs. Claude the API vs. Cl…

What exactly did you try with GitHub copilot? It’s not an LLM itself, just in interface for an LLM. I have copilot in my professional GitHub account and I can choose between chat-gpt and Claude.

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#78

Post by astrostl » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 6:16 PM UTC

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?

With aggressive Claude Code use I didn't find Sonnet better than Opus but I did find it faster while consuming far fewer tokens. Once I switched to the $100 Max plan and configured CC to exclusively use Sonnet I haven't run into a plan token limit even once. When I saw this announcement my first thing was to CMD-F and see when Sonnet 4.1 was coming out, because I don't really care about Opus outside of interactive deep research usage.

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#79

Post by mrcwinn » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 6:18 PM UTC

o3 and o3-pro are just so good. Sonnet goes off the deep end too often and Opus, in my experience, is not as strong at reasoning compared to OpenAI, despite the higher costs. Rarely do we see a worse, more expensive product win - but competition is good and I’m rooting for Anthropic nonetheless!

Re: Claude Opus 4.1

#80

Post by thoop » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 6:19 PM UTC

The article says "We plan to release substantially larger improvements to our models in the coming weeks."

Sonnet 4 has definitely been the best model for our product's use case, but I'd be interested in trying Haiku 4 (or 4.1?) just due to the cost savings.

I'm surprised Anthropic hasn't mentioned anything about Haiku 4 yet since they released the other models.