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Claude Opus 4.8

anthropic.com

421–430 of 1001 posts

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#421
post #162
post #73

I generated pelicans riding bicycles on both thinking level low and thinking level high: https://gist.github.com/simonw/68560eddb0b268a8417f80ceb7304... The high one is notably better - the bicycle frame is the correct shape, unlike thinking level low. For comparison, here's Opus 4.7: https://gist.github.com/simonw/afcb19addf3f38eb1996e1ebe749c...

Hey simonw I love your test, do you think using thinking level "max" makes sense for this test? I would love to see the results about it.

I don't think the API supports "max" as an option, that might just be a Claude Code harness thing.

UPDATE: My mistake, the API does support max. I added a max one at the bottom of this page (cost 43 cents): https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer#url=ht...

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#422
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...

It’s how AGI is going to happen. All of this shit is emergent and none of it is predictable. It’s not going to be some self aware consciousness, it’s just going to be a very advanced model that makes very few mistakes and can reason very well. Well enough that it can start collecting data and training its own successor.

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#423

"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 littl…

All the 4.x models are still available, and they all cost the same.

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#424
post #385

My fav coding benchmark for frontier models is to build a simple RTS game in one file (js/html/css). Claude Code with Opus 4.8 in ultracode mode nailed it, the best result so far: https://bsky.app/profile/senko.net/post/3mmwnrkwboc2v The prompt was: Create a simple but functional real time strategy (RTS) game similar to old WarCraft, StarCraft or Command & Conquer games. The player should be able to build buildings,…

It almost appears as if the code was minified. The variable names are short and formatting looks like it's written to minimize whitespace. Did it write it in this compact format all on it's own?

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#425
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…

why are the models the same price?

https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/pricing

``` Model Base Input Tokens 5m Cache Writes 1h Cache Writes Cache Hits & Refreshes Output Tokens

Claude Opus 4.8 $5 / MTok $6.25 / MTok $10 / MTok $0.50 / MTok $25 / MTok

Claude Opus 4.7 $5 / MTok $6.25 / MTok $10 / MTok $0.50 / MTok $25 / MTok

Claude Opus 4.6 $5 / MTok $6.25 / MTok $10 / MTok $0.50 / MTok $25 / MTok

Claude Opus 4.5 $5 / MTok $6.25 / MTok $10 / MTok $0.50 / MTok $25 / MTok

Claude Opus 4.1 $15 / MTok $18.75 / MTok $30 / MTok $1.50 / MTok $75 / MTok

Claude Opus 4 (deprecated) $15 / MTok $18.75 / MTok $30 / MTok $1.50 / MTok $75 / MTok

Claude Sonnet 4.6 $3 / MTok $3.75 / MTok $6 / MTok $0.30 / MTok $15 / MTok

Claude Sonnet 4.5 $3 / MTok $3.75 / MTok $6 / MTok $0.30 / MTok $15 / MTok

Claude Sonnet 4 (deprecated) $3 / MTok $3.75 / MTok $6 / MTok $0.30 / MTok $15 / MTok

Claude Haiku 4.5 $1 / MTok $1.25 / MTok $2 / MTok $0.10 / MTok $5 / MTok

Claude Haiku 3.5 (retired, except on Bedrock and Vertex AI) $0.80 / MTok $1 / MTok $1.60 / MTok $0.08 / MTok $4 / MTok ```

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#426
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…

[deleted]

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#427
post #394

Frontier models are mostly past the point of human ability to discern whether they are actually better or worse than predecessors and competitors. I suspect the benchmarks may also be saturated, or at least past their usefulness. I personally feel that Anthropic doesn't understand what this means for the frontier labs, and moreover that they might be the only frontier lab that doesn't. 1. Google dropped Gemini 3.5 Fl…

I thought 4.7 was noticeably better than 4.6.

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#428

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…

I would be shocked if 5.5 is the last new pre-train from OpenAI. Your comment is nonsense.

5.5 is not a generation it is a trivial iteration...

6 is for sure happening...

As is Gemini 4.

It's less certain there will be a Gemini 5 or GPT 7 any time soon that is a true next "generation" and not just an iteration. They will almost certainly call something Gemini 5 and GPT 7...

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#429
post #394

Frontier models are mostly past the point of human ability to discern whether they are actually better or worse than predecessors and competitors. I suspect the benchmarks may also be saturated, or at least past their usefulness. I personally feel that Anthropic doesn't understand what this means for the frontier labs, and moreover that they might be the only frontier lab that doesn't. 1. Google dropped Gemini 3.5 Fl…

The Chinese stuff is good enough for up to 80% of the frontier on most text tasks but they are significantly worse at code. They just don’t “get” what you’re asking for like Codex and Claude and require so many more iterations to get close to what you need.

Agreed. But we're seeing Cursor (now SpaceX) take these models and add great coding capability on top of them. Frontier model providers should be concerned that Composer 2.5 costs $0.50/$2.50 (versus Opus 4.8 $5/$25). That's why Google prioritized Gemini 3.5 Flash, and talked up how near-frontier it is ($1.50/$9).

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#430
post #308

Probably explains why Opus was trash for the last week - https://marginlab.ai/trackers/claude-code/ . Curious if the new baseline will rise now in-line with the new benchmarks.

Nice. Can you release that for older models too? I've been using a mixture of releases recently, and cannot tell the difference between any of them.

I don’t run it, unfortunately:)
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