Live data from Hacker News

Claude Opus 4.8

anthropic.com

121–130 of 1001 posts

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#121
post #35
post #6

> One of the most prominent improvements in Opus 4.8 is its honesty Anthropic talks about their own models as if they're discovering new species in the wild...

AI is grown, not built, and like with anything you grow, you'll never be able to predict exactly how it will turn out.

The map is not the territory

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#122
post #77

A rambling comment: I think this is the first time we've had a third minor version bump on a frontier Anthropic model. (I count the 0.5s as major here, because they've been issued non-sequentially and also corresponded to massive capability leaps, eg, Sonnet 3.5, Opus 4.5). So now the Opus 4.5 family has successors 4.6, 4.7, and 4.8, each posting fairly modest claimed gains. My own experience w/ 4.6 and 4.7 are that…

Maybe try making a simple randomize script to swap the three latest models. And see if you can tell which ones are meaningfully different without knowing which ones are flipped on or off?

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#123

Does anyone troll these releases and cherry pick random metrics other companies would cherry pick to show how amazing their models are? There's like 8 million benchmarks. Every release, every model randomly picks 5-10 where they win in everything except 1, to make it look like they aren't randomly cherry picking benchmarks they probably benchmaxxed for.

On this note, is there a benchmark aggregator to compile all benchmarks in a single large grid?

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#124

> One of the most prominent improvements in Opus 4.8 is its honesty. We train all our models to be honest—for instance, to avoid making claims that they can’t support. But a general problem with AI models is that they sometimes jump to conclusions, confidently claiming to have made progress in their work despite the evidence being thin. Early testers report that Opus 4.8 is more likely to flag uncertainties about its…

Part of the problem is also garbage-in/garbage-out. There's a lot of human information on the internet that is also confidently wrong.

I use Sonnet a lot for learning about history or contextualizing news topics. It's really good at this for the most part. But there are a lot of topics where "consensus" between either academics or journalists is really "one secondary source which gets repeated a lot".

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#126
post #77

A rambling comment: I think this is the first time we've had a third minor version bump on a frontier Anthropic model. (I count the 0.5s as major here, because they've been issued non-sequentially and also corresponded to massive capability leaps, eg, Sonnet 3.5, Opus 4.5). So now the Opus 4.5 family has successors 4.6, 4.7, and 4.8, each posting fairly modest claimed gains. My own experience w/ 4.6 and 4.7 are that…

IMO they have all been clean and noticeable upgrades over their predecessors. Opus 4.7 in particular was a solid jump in capabilities.

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#130
post #77

A rambling comment: I think this is the first time we've had a third minor version bump on a frontier Anthropic model. (I count the 0.5s as major here, because they've been issued non-sequentially and also corresponded to massive capability leaps, eg, Sonnet 3.5, Opus 4.5). So now the Opus 4.5 family has successors 4.6, 4.7, and 4.8, each posting fairly modest claimed gains. My own experience w/ 4.6 and 4.7 are that…

4.7 was a significant jump in the ability to run long-horizon tasks. It immediately completed tasks that 4.6 was unable to, even though I have the impression that it became a bit less capable over the first few weeks after release.

It also seems to be helpless at effort levels < xhigh, I turn to Sonnet when simpler tasks are needed.

Post reply on HN