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…
With that said, they are now hitting the walls of energy costs and memory shortages. You brain uses 20W -- don't take it as an insult. There are orders of magnitude to gain from producing energy-efficient models (or model runners).
So I am expecting same performance at lower costs for the coming years.