Live data from Hacker News

Claude Sonnet 4.6

anthropic.com

451–460 of 1001 posts

Re: Claude Sonnet 4.6

#451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only until the music stops. Racing to give away the most stuff for free can only last so long. Eventually you run out of other people’s money.

Uber managed to make it work for quite a while

They did, but Uber is no longer cheap [1]. Is the parent’s point that it can’t last forever? For Uber it lasted long enough to drive most of the competition away.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jun/25/second-st...

Re: Claude Sonnet 4.6

#452
post #223

I always grew up hearing “competition is good for the consumer.” But I never really internalized how good fierce battles for market share are. The amount of competition in a space is directly proportional to how good the results are for consumers.

Unfortunately, people naively assume all markets behave like this, even when the market, in reality, is not set up for full competition (due to monopolies, monopsonies, informational asymmetry, etc).

And AI is currently killing a bunch of markets intentionally: the RAM deal for OpenAI wouldn't have gone through the way it did if it wasn't done in secret with anti-competitive restrictions.

There's a world of difference between what's happening and RAM prices if OAI and others were just bidding for produced modules as they released.

Re: Claude Sonnet 4.6

#453

Still fails the car wash question, I took the prompt from the title of this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47031580 The answer was "Walk! It would be a bit counterproductive to drive a dirty car 50 meters just to get it washed — you'd barely move before arriving. Walking takes less than a minute, and you can simply drive it through the wash and walk back home afterward." I've tried several other variant…

My answer was (for which it did zero thinking and answered near-instantaneously):

"Drive. You're going there to use water and machinery that require the car to be present. The question answers itself."

I tried it 3 more times with extended thinking explicitly off:

"Drive. You're going to a car wash."

"Drive. You're washing the car, not yourself."

"Drive. You're washing the car — it needs to be there."

Guess they're serving you the dumb version.

Re: Claude Sonnet 4.6

#454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean enshittification has not begun quite yet. Everyone is still raising capital so current investors can pass the bag to the next set. Soon as the money runs out monetization will overtake valuation as top priority. Then suddenly when you ask any of these models “how do I make chocolate chip cookies?” you will get something like: > You will need one cup King Arthur All Purpose white flour, one large brown Eggland’…

While this is funny, the actual race already started in how companies can nudge LLM results towards their products. We can't be saved from enshittification, I fear.

I am excited about a future where I am constantly reminded to like and subscribe my LLM’s output.

Re: Claude Sonnet 4.6

#455
post #453

Still fails the car wash question, I took the prompt from the title of this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47031580 The answer was "Walk! It would be a bit counterproductive to drive a dirty car 50 meters just to get it washed — you'd barely move before arriving. Walking takes less than a minute, and you can simply drive it through the wash and walk back home afterward." I've tried several other variant…

My answer was (for which it did zero thinking and answered near-instantaneously): "Drive. You're going there to use water and machinery that require the car to be present. The question answers itself." I tried it 3 more times with extended thinking explicitly off: "Drive. You're going to a car wash." "Drive. You're washing the car, not yourself." "Drive. You're washing the car — it needs to be there." Guess they're s…

I got this: Drive. Getting the car wet while walking there defeats the purpose.

Gotta keep the car dry on the way!

Re: Claude Sonnet 4.6

#456
post #9

[flagged]

We have good ways of monitoring chatbots and they're going to get better. I've seen some interesting research. For example, a chatbot is not really a unified entity that's loyal to itself; with the right incentives, it will leak to claim the reward. [1]

Since chatbots have no right to privacy, they would need to be very intelligent indeed to work around this.

[1] https://alignment.openai.com/confessions/

Re: Claude Sonnet 4.6

#457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the low cost of labor in addition to lack of environmental regulation that made China a success story. I'm sure the competition helps too but it's not main driver

That happens in most of the world. Why China, then?

Because they have a billion and a half people and they were willing to be the western world’s factory.

Re: Claude Sonnet 4.6

#458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consciousness is orthogonal to this. If the AI acts in a way that we would call deceptive, if a human did it, then the AI was deceptive. There's no point in coming up with some other description of the behavior just because it was an AI that did it.

Sure, but Moltbook demonstrates that AI models do not engage in truly coordinated behavior. They simply do not behave the way real humans do on social media sites - the actual behavior can be differentiated.

"Coordinated" and "deceptive" are orthogonal concepts as well. If AIs are acting in a way that's not coordinated, then of course, don't say they're coordinating.

AIs today can replicate some human behaviors, and not others. If we want to discuss which things they do and which they don't, then it'll be easiest if we use the common words for those behaviors even when we're talking about AI.

Re: Claude Sonnet 4.6

#459
post #48
post #10

It's wild that Sonnet 4.6 is roughly as capable as Opus 4.5 - at least according to Anthropic's benchmarks. It will be interesting to see if that's the case in real, practical, everyday use. The speed at which this stuff is improving is really remarkable; it feels like the breakneck pace of compute performance improvements of the 1990s.

The most exciting part isn't necessarily the ceiling raising though that's happening, but the floor rising while costs plummet. Getting Opus-level reasoning at Sonnet prices/latency is what actually unlocks agentic workflows. We are effectively getting the same intelligence unit for half the compute every 6-9 months.

This is what excited me about Sonnet 4.6. I've been running Opus 4.6, and switched over to Sonnet 4.6 today to see if I could notice a difference. So far, I can't detect much if any difference, but it doesn't hit my usage quota as hard.
Post reply on HN