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Claude Opus 4.8

anthropic.com

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Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#211

Post by Schiendelman »

HAL3000 wrote: post #153
james_marks wrote: post #26

> 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…

How do you test other features?

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#212

Post by ceroxylon »

cedws wrote: post #108

I'm very suspicious of these same price model launches. It feels like they're benchmaxxed so they can put everyone on them and reduce their compute costs behind the scenes. If the model were genuinely better why wouldn't they charge more for it? Charging the same for something better is a race to the bottom. Opus 4.7 wasn't noticably any better for me, I still use 4.6 because it's cheaper.

Deepseek made their 75% discount permanent, so I can imagine that Anthropic didn't want any of the news stories around this to focus on or mention a price increase.

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#213

Post by __mharrison__ »

pants2 wrote: post #160
wg0 wrote: post #104

There is a hole in the boat's bottom due to Chinese models. They might not be as good but they are not bad either or at least I had hard time finding any issues with Deepseekv4 Flash and Pro variants. They get their job done sometimes rarely giving up till they are done what they are after. So even for enterprise deployments, as the dust settles down, CFO/CTOs might find out that deploying on an internal cluster of G…

The Chinese models are only cheap on subsidized Chinese hosting. I have yet to find a USA-hosted Chinese model with a very clear value advantage over US models.

Odd take. I'm running them locally at my desk (DGX Spark and 128GB MBP). They work fine for 90% of what most folks do. Admittedly, they do run slower on my hw than on the cloud.

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#216

Post by giraffe_lady »

gen220 wrote: post #135
NiloCK wrote: 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'm curious to poll HN on this issue. Do you feel like we've had meaningful/noticeable gains in terms of your programming workflows between 4.5 and 4.7? My 2¢, I personally feel like all of the productivity gains since 4.5's release (in November 2025!!) have come from improvements to the harnesses (cc, cursor cli, codex, opencode, whatever) AND from the context window expansion from 200k to 1M. But the actual "raw" i…

I actually don't see any personal productivity improvements from using opus over sonnet for coding. If you're keeping tasks small and conversations short, reading the code and correcting before changes go in, whatever advantages opus has aren't practically significant. It's also just talky as hell, overexplains anything it touches and every token produced this way increases the surface area for hallucination so you need to have your guard up even more with it.

There's a sweet spot of complexity for low importance tasks where it's just big enough I don't want to do it and just simple enough to have opus plan/delegate/review with another model. So possibly model improvements will grow this window, but currently I don't do much in there.

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#217

Post by pants2 »

toephu2 wrote: post #192

The rapid release cadence and rate of innovation of Anthropic (and OpenAI) is impressive. And obviously it's because these are startups solely dedicated to AI so they can move quickly. Big Tech (like Google) won't be able to keep up with the pace of them (too much bureaucracy and red tape at Google). Classic Innovator's Dilemma. The longer a company exists, the more people, processes, and rules are added, which inevi…

Yes, I think this has become their competitive edge to stay relevant and retain customers. If a lab falls behind the frontier for too long, they will lose customers to other models. Google, DeepSeek, and XAI have all released frontier models in the past, but they fall behind and people lose interest.

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#220

Post by boc »

carlos-menezes wrote: post #67

I, for lack of a better word, dislike anyone who anthropomorphizes AI.

I see this take, but it's actually helpful to talk to an LLM in human terms; after all, it's how they are trained.

If you keep talking to it like it's a rock, it'll run your queries through a different posture and you might get worse outcomes. Worse if you yell at it, it's now in a conflict resolution mode instead of pure utility mode.

I think we can be intelligent enough to know we're talking to a pile of fancy rocks with electric currents running through it, AND still understand that the best performance comes from talking to those rocks nicely.

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