Claude Opus 4.8 • Hacker News Board

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#591

Post by hypfer » Thu, May 28, 2026, 9:01 PM UTC

okamiueru wrote: post #584

hypfer wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (it's smarter than me?) I genuinely hope that you're joking with that statement. Or this is a bot. Or an ARG. Or Art. Help.

If LLMs have tough me anything, is that the average person is far more gullible than what I could have imagined.

That and also.. predictable. Robotic, even. Stimulus => Reaction

Which is a shame, because people would have the potential for greatness. But instead, for a plethora of reasons and factors (internal and external) people end up as fleshy automatons sleepwalking on rails.

Talking _extensively_ with LLMs over the last years made me understand humans a lot better, but, in hindsight, I'm not sure if that was a good thing.

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#592

Post by F7F7F7 » Thu, May 28, 2026, 9:02 PM UTC

scuderiaseb wrote: post #541

northern-lights wrote: post #23

> Not only that, but we plan to release a new class of model with even higher intelligence than Opus. As part of Project Glasswing, a small number of organizations are currently using Claude Mythos Preview for cybersecurity work. Models of this capability level require stronger cyber safeguards before they can be generally released. We’re making swift progress on developing these safeguards and expect to be able to b…

So this is how they’ll remove access from Claude Pro to the biggest models. You would need at least a Claude Max subscription for the bigger than Opus models I bet.

Anthropic's wants to sell us Claude Code with no model selection at all.

Opus seems to be overly eager of late to 'vibe' out entire solutions and build out things that you didn't ask for.

/goals is helping set the narrative that does it really matter if Sonnet and 3 Haiku agents got you to that end state...eventually...if its what you asked for?

For better or worse Opus is already handing off 80% of its work to background agents of Sonnet, Haiku, and likely a quantized Opus.

Want model selection? Pay for the API.

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#593

Post by elSidCampeador » Thu, May 28, 2026, 9:02 PM UTC

colonCapitalDee wrote: post #32

"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…

Are they doing these smaller releases to attune users to a more incremental cycle of updates? Like, yeah other model providers do these major updates every x months, we on the other hand do incremental updates every x/2 months

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#594

Post by theptip » Thu, May 28, 2026, 9:03 PM UTC

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…

My read - 4.7 was a tactical lobotomy to improve the average experience at the expense of peak performance; necessary due to compute pressure.

Now that they have Colossus capacity, I guess they can tune up the intelligence again and spend more tokens on reasoning budgets.

4.7 was definitely a lot more flaky for me vs. 4.6 before the reasoning bugs.

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#595

Post by conradkay » Thu, May 28, 2026, 9:05 PM UTC

mesmertech wrote: post #170

siwakotisaurav wrote: post #100

Was about to split my $200 max plan into $100 Claude and $100 codex, let’s see if I still need to

I think gpt 5.6 is coming out today so might wanna wait

Probably not till mid June

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#596

Post by joshstrange » Thu, May 28, 2026, 9:05 PM UTC

michaelchisari wrote: post #339

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #136

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.

I think Apple might come out ahead by pure accident. Yes, Apple often waits to enter a market until it's established but in the case of AI they tried, they tried and failed. It was never the original plan to partner with OpenAI and then later with Google (Gemini). They 100% missed the boat on AI, the question now becomes: was the boat worth taking and we are still waiting to see how that plays out.

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#597

Post by conradkay » Thu, May 28, 2026, 9:07 PM UTC

Nicholas_C wrote: post #12

mincer_ray wrote: post #3

seems like a really minor upgrade?

I think they will all be minor going forward, feels like the major improvements have all been made and we'll only see incremental improvements from here on out. Maybe I'm wrong but we'll see.

I think there's just less time between model releases now

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#598

Post by hmokiguess » Thu, May 28, 2026, 9:10 PM UTC

They must have been A/B testing this with 4.7 lately, I noticed it changed from its normal mode in a way that matches a lot the just released 4.8

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#599

Post by ddp26 » Thu, May 28, 2026, 9:12 PM UTC

colonCapitalDee wrote: post #32

"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…

It is refreshing but perhaps actually not warranted this time?

I mostly study web research, and Opus 4.7 was a regression on BrowseComp compared to Opus 4.6, which has been born out by my usage.

Opus 4.8 is now much better than either 4.7 or 4.6, and having it search the web is one of the primary use cases of chatbots.

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#600

Post by frankest » Thu, May 28, 2026, 9:12 PM UTC

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #136

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 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…

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