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Claude Opus 4.8

anthropic.com

351–360 of 1001 posts

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#351
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…

I won't be surprised if the next gen frontier models are the last. There's orders of magnitude of low hanging juice to squeeze out of smaller models. It is almost guaranteed that a 60-90B model can outperform current SOTA in coding tasks within 2-3 years (design not certain, probably unlikely). It is far less clear that a 1.2T model will be meaningfully better enough to justify training it. As far as reasoning is con…

I looked into this "GRAM" stuff a sibling comment links further to, and just to say:

- this gets reinvented/rediscovered constantly under different names

- it cant be trained very well (right now, will change)

- massive theoretical improvements over current models (log_2(vocabsize)=17, residual stream dim is thousands of dimensions, recursivity means more information bandwidth by ~3 OoM)

- BUT it cant be interpreted or aligned I follow this stuff closely, I think I know what I'm talking about (edited for formating)

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#352
post #42

I haven't tried opus 4.8 yet, but I hope the writing quality has returned to the Opus 4.5 level. Anthropic really lost something, where 4.5 had this really crisp writing style that flowed really nicely and 4.6 and 4.7 sound much more "chatgpt-like." It feels like they tuned it to be too much of a problem solver, and when you do that you get this terse, clipped textual output that's more difficult to read.

I've noticed this too. Part of why i don't like GPT is because of how verbose it is but opus 4.7 is nearly as bad. I don't need an essay in response to every question

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I won't be surprised if the next gen frontier models are the last. There's orders of magnitude of low hanging juice to squeeze out of smaller models. It is almost guaranteed that a 60-90B model can outperform current SOTA in coding tasks within 2-3 years (design not certain, probably unlikely). It is far less clear that a 1.2T model will be meaningfully better enough to justify training it. As far as reasoning is con…

| a 60-90B model can outperform current SOTA My conspiracy theory is that Apple recognizes this.

> My conspiracy theory is that Apple recognizes this.

I don't think that's not a conspiracy theory. AFAIK, It's their stated AI policy...

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#356

> 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…

Yeah, it's super annoying. A few days ago, Opus 4.7 created a plan with several items on it, including an auth feature. It then went through the plan and reported that it had created the auth feature, that everything was secure, and that the tests passed. The issue was that it hadn't actually implemented the auth feature. After I confronted it about this, it admitted that it indeed hadn't done it and said it would im…

> If we had just trusted its output, we would now have a security vulnerability in production, allowing anyone to access other people's accounts.

This is one reason you always get a different model to review a model's PR. Gemini Or GPT-codex would have certainly noticed the missing auth.

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I won't be surprised if the next gen frontier models are the last. There's orders of magnitude of low hanging juice to squeeze out of smaller models. It is almost guaranteed that a 60-90B model can outperform current SOTA in coding tasks within 2-3 years (design not certain, probably unlikely). It is far less clear that a 1.2T model will be meaningfully better enough to justify training it. As far as reasoning is con…

| a 60-90B model can outperform current SOTA My conspiracy theory is that Apple recognizes this.

That does seem to be the path Apple is following here. Have a local model that can answer most things and then have a fallback of cloud options when they request is too complex. The cleverness of this strategy has been overshadowed by the incredibly poor quality of their local models. It will be extremely interesting to see what next month holds and whether Google helped fine tune an Apple specific Gemini / Gemma model for their devices. Bonus points, of course, if they unveil the M5 Ultra Studio with half a terabyte of RAM to be a local "cloud model" (the true fantasy here of course would be Apple building something a little like openclaw where from your phone you could give commands to your Home Apple server). They could probably get away with charging $20k for it if it has sufficient tok/sec. If that happens and is successful one could imagine a straight line path in the next two generations to bringing the cost and form factor down to the point where some of the form factor of an Apple TV becomes everybody's home inference server / agentic HQ. Sovereign AI for everyone!

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#358

There is an obvious shift in sentiment amongst users, at least here in the US. I feel it myself, even as a proponent of AI tools, the bloviating and language that these companies use in these release articles are starting to wear thin on my patience. Its possible we might just be witnessing a shift in fashion, where this type of sentimentality was more acceptable when it was novel and new, but now it just appears out…

I don't agree at all for these coding models. Even the most anti-AI people from last year seem to be giving in to using them.

My take from going through comments on HN is that many people are being mandated to use them, not that they are just giving in. Maybe I'm misreading, but that was my impression.

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#360

Ugh... Invalid request The request couldn't be completed. View details API Error: 400 messages.1.content.7: `thinking` or `redacted_thinking` blocks in the latest assistant message cannot be modified. These blocks must remain as they were in the original response. I would rather not. 4.6 was fine. 4.7 got to be fine 1 week after the release. Now 4.8. No difference, same thing. But the app is broken and nothing works.…

I'm hitting this too! And I assumed it was a backwards-compatibility issue with my live conversation with Opus 4.7, but then I hit it in a fresh conversation with Opus 4.8. Vibe code release bug I guess?

I mean, switching back to 4.7 does not work either. So console it is. But vibe release - for sure.

And I'm paying money for this.

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