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Claude Opus 4.8

anthropic.com

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Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#641
post #638

The way that Mythos is likely being used to train these publicly available models, I wonder if there will always be a private, mostly/wholly internal model that is significantly ahead technically but is reserved for internal or "VIP" use.

If there isn’t they’ve obviously missed an important and lucrative market.

In fact, there should be more and more secret tiers for bigger and bigger money.

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#642
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…

There is endless returns to frontier intelligence, just because most people can't make use of it doesn't mean someone can't make a ton of money off of it.

Most software engineers will just need cheap tokens.

But things like physics and drug discovery have no forseeable upper bound.

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#643
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…

There is endless returns to frontier intelligence, just because most people can't make use of it doesn't mean someone can't make a ton of money off of it.

Most software engineers will just need cheap tokens.

But things like physics and drug discovery have no foreseeable upper bound.

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#644
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,…

Thanks for also sharing the prompt. I've been testing claude by asking it to make similar things, so it's useful to see what other people are doing.

I do find it interesting that the visual style is pretty similar to things it's produced for me.

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#645
post #638

The way that Mythos is likely being used to train these publicly available models, I wonder if there will always be a private, mostly/wholly internal model that is significantly ahead technically but is reserved for internal or "VIP" use.

If there isn’t they’ve obviously missed an important and lucrative market. In fact, there should be more and more secret tiers for bigger and bigger money.

Ohhhh. I get it now. OpenAI is open in the sense that it's open to the public, unlike Anthropic, with special VIP access to models, like a nightclub.

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#646
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…

It's almost like they used up most of the benefits of scaling and the fundamental issues that people have been talking about with LLMs for years are real.

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#647
post #642

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…

There is endless returns to frontier intelligence, just because most people can't make use of it doesn't mean someone can't make a ton of money off of it. Most software engineers will just need cheap tokens. But things like physics and drug discovery have no forseeable upper bound.

Within software engineering, security, reliability, and scale also seem boundless.

Software that never breaks (including because it never runs into scaling problems) and never leaks your data is preferable to software that breaks and leaks your data sometimes, but it has been too costly to be practical.

Current models are still very far from the reasoning muscle required to build things that never break, scale to billions of users with no issues, and cannot be exploited.

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#648
post #559
post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yeah looks extremely compact. I didn't instruct it or told it to use as few lines of code or characters or nothing of the sort. Not sure why it did that. Its own rationale (which is highly suspect, but the only lead I have) is that it defaults to dense style if it has to write a file in a single go. May be a kernel of truth somewhere in there.

And much code on the web “in production” is minimized.

Re: Claude Opus 4.8

#649
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...

I bet someone shares this link every time you post about bicycles, but since I didn't see anyone share it yet in this thread, I'll take the opportunity to do so: https://www.gianlucagimini.it/portfolio-item/velocipedia/ Turns out even humans can be pretty bad at drawing bicycles :)

> The most unintelligible drawing has also the most unintelligible handwriting. It was made by a doctor.

Haha

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