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Claude Opus 4.8

anthropic.com

361–370 of 1001 posts

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#361
These models starting to feel like Windows versions. Windows 95 was a promising start, but buggy. Windows ME was a disaster. Windows XP was good, but slightly buggy. Windows Vista was a bloated disaster. Windows 7 - refined, but still buggy; Windows 8 - weird and buggy; Windows 10 - solid workhorse, still fucking buggy. Windows 11 - pretty, but not sure why does it even exist.

Why did we even get Opus 4.7, what was the point?

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#362
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 my own tastes are saturated now”

It might be saturated for smaller scopes of work, but it’s not hard to see the cracks when you scale up what you ask of SOTA models/agents.

One example, to try and single shot prompt coding a ChatGPT equivalent chatbot.

Sure it will spit something out, but the feature depth, UX subtitles, backend integration, and lots of pragmatic engineering decisions along the way will just not be baked.

Another example is building a C compiler from scratch which Anthropic showed is still a struggle to do.

Not that these these specific examples are important but just to point out scaling up expectations shows the cracks.

It’s not just a model problem of course, better agents, orchestration features (like Dynamic Workflows mentioned in the post), all need to continue to evolve.

Ar what point does my CS degree become totally useless is an open question.

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#363

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.

https://arena.ai/leaderboard - I’ve found this company is a pretty good ranker - not sure their exact methodology but during day to day programming with Claude / gpt models I’ve felt qualitatively what they report

Also check mine[0], basically random private tests/questions and an ok-ish methodology, testing mostly for general intelligence than coding-specific tasks.

I built it for myself, to test which models to use via OpenRouter for my n8n agents. Currently actually still using gpt-5.3-codex for many things, as its pricing is really good in production (due to how their token caching works).

Gemini models still have the best intelligence (when asked any questions, most likely to get it right), but in production they still have many failure modes[1].

[0]: https://aibenchy.com

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48230368

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#364
I've said it before, but I don't like Opus past version 4.5. It became unresponsive, thinking for too long without feedback, sometimes seemingly getting stuck. I guess it might be marginally better for some benchmarks, but when using it as coding assistant, the new models are worse. Even the new Sonnet versions do that. I'm slowly getting used to Haiku-level LLMs with the hope to run it locally at some point. It's less autonomous, but maybe that's for the best.

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#365
Can anyone explain how this is possible?

  Developers can update Claude’s instructions mid-task without breaking the prompt cache or routing the update through a user turn. This can be used in a given harness to update permissions, token budgets, or environment context as an agent runs.
Does this means the instructions are no longer just something in the early part of the conversation? (If they were, changing them would invalidate the KV cache. no?)

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#366

"Users will find Opus 4.8 to be a modest but tangible improvement on its predecessor." This is a refreshing attitude! I've also verified that you can now turn off adaptive thinking in the web UI, which is great. I've had a lot of problems with thinking not triggering and the model producing sub-par output. Glad we can finally turn it off. (I hope being able to turn off adaptive thinking is new, if I could have turned…

> This is a refreshing attitude!

Well, I think the attitude is that costs are allowed to escalate faster and more steeply than the features delivered. From that perspective, semantic versioning is a handy tool for adjusting pricing strategies. IMHO, it (versioning) only makes sense for open-source projects, where you can clearly see the actual changes made with each version upgrade. Anything else is more than a little suspicious…

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#367
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 think the future will be enterprise clients will train their own models based on their needs and data.

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#368

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…

you just need to look at Mythos to see the jump in performance from a 10T(?) model. As they scale, they get more capable. We might have an yearly release, but I believe the releases will continue, as long as scaling laws are in tact, and there's huge problems still need solving. (think cancer)

You forget that these models are still only interpolating between human-generated datapoints fed to them. They cannot reason beyond the data they've been given, so unless everything you want to create with AI is a synthesis of prior art, you're back to relying on the stone-age human brain that created AI in the first place.

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#369

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…

[dead]

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#370

4.8 also seems like a regression and using it from the chat GUI results in 4.6 no longer showing up. If someone from anthropic is here, is it possible to readd 4.6 in the "other models" dropdown ? I feel like I got a bit baited/switched here.

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