I did some work yesterday with Opus and found it amazing.
Today we are almost on non-speaking terms.
I'm asking it to do some simple stuff and he's making incredible stupid mistakes:
This is the third time that I have to ask you to remove the issue that was there for more than 20 hours. What is going on here?
and at the same time the compacting is firing like crazy. (What adds ~4 minute delays every 1 - 15 minutes)
| # | Time | Gap before | Session span | API calls |
|---|----------|-----------|--------------|-----------|
| 1 | 15:51:13 | 8s | <1m | 1 |
| 2 | 15:54:35 | 48s | 37m | 51 |
| 3 | 16:33:33 | 2s | 19m | 42 |
| 4 | 16:53:44 | 1s | 9m | 30 |
| 5 | 17:04:37 | 1s | 17m | 30 |
# — sequential compaction event number, ordered by time.
Time — timestamp of the first API call in the resumed session, i.e. when the new context (carrying the compaction summary) was first sent to the
model.
Gap before — time between the last API call of the prior session and the first call of this one. Includes any compaction processing time plus user
think time between the two sessions.
Session span — how long this compaction-resumed session ran, from its first API call to its last before the next compaction (or end of session).
API calls — total number of API requests made during this resumed session. Each tool use, each reply, each intermediate step = one request.
Bottomline, I will probably stay on Sonnet until they fix all these issues.
productivity (tokens per second per hardware unit) increases at the cost of output quality, but the price remains the same.
both Anthropic and OpenAI quantize their models a few weeks after release. they'd never admit it out loud, but it's more or less common knowledge now. no one has enough compute.
I think that the idea is each action uses more tokens, which means that users hit their limit sooner, and are consequently unable to burn more compute.
> I read the V1 code this time instead of guessing
Does the LLM even keep a (self-accessible) record of previous internal actions to make this assertion believable, or is this yet another confabulation?
Yes, the LLM is able to see the entire prior chat history including tool use. This type of interaction occurs when the LLM fails to read the file, but acts as though it had.
This seems like the experience I've had with every model I've tried over the last several years. It seems like an inherent limitation of the technology, despite the hyperbolic claims of those financially invested in all of this paying off.
Opus 4.6 pre-nerf was incredible, almost magical. It changed my understanding of how good models could be. But that's the only model that ever made me feel that way.
Yes! I genuinely got a LOT of shit done with Opus 4.6 "pre nerf" with regular old out-of-the-box config, no crazy skills or hacks or memory tweaks or anything. The downfall is palpable. Textbook rugpull.
They've jumped the shark. I truly can't comprehend why all of these changes were necessary. They had a literal money printing machine that actually got real shit done, really well. Now it's a gamble every time and I am pulling back hard from Anthropic ecosystem.
LLMs exist on a logaritmhic performance/cost frontier. It's not really clear whether Opus 4.5+ represent a level shift on this frontier or just inhabits place on that curve which delivers higher performance, but at rapidly diminishing returns to inference cost.
To me, it is hard to reject this hypothesis today. The fact that Anthropic is rapidly trying to increase price may betray the fact that their recent lead is at the cost of dramatically higher operating costs. Their gross margins in this past quarter will be an important data point on this.
I think the tendency for graphs of model assessment to display the log of cost/tokens on the x axis (i.e. Artificial Analysis' site) has obscured this dynamic.
That post doesn't address the human factor of cost, and I don't mean that in a good way. Even if AI costs more than a human, it's tireless, doesn't need holidays, is never going to have to go to HR for sexual harassment issues, won't show up hungover or need an advance to pay for a dying relative's surgery. It can be turned on and off with the flip of a switch. Hire 30 today, fire 25 of them next week. Spin another 5 up just before the trade show demo needs to go out and fire them with no remorse afterwards.
The cost to hire a human is highly predictable. The cost of AI isn't. I, as a human, need food and shelter, which puts a ceiling to my bargaining power. I can't withdraw my labour indefinitely.
The power dynamics are also vastly against me. I represent a fraction of my employer's labour, but my employer represents 100% of my income.
That dynamic is totally inverted with AI. You are a rounding error on their revenue sheet, they have a monopoly on your work throughput. How do you budget an workforce that could turn 20% more expensive overnight?
By continuously testing competitors and local LLMs? The reason for rising prices is that they (Anthropic) probably realized that they have reached a ceiling of what LLMs are capable of, and while it's a lot, it is still not a big moat and it's definitely not intelligence.
This is why there are a ton of corps running the open source models in house... Known costs, known performance, upgrade as you see fit. The consumer backlash against 4o was noted by a few orgs, and they saw the writing on the wall... they didnt want to develop against a platform built on quicksand (see openweb, apps on Facebook and a host of other examples).
There are people out there making smart AI business decisions, to have control over performance and costs.
That was a great promise before the models starting becoming "moody" due to their proprietors arbitrarily modifying their performance capabilities and defaults without transparency or recourse.
I think it's difficult to say agentic and human developer labor are fungible in the real world at this point. Agents may succeed in discrete tasks, like those in a benchmark assessment, but those requiring a larger context window (i.e. working in brownfield systems, which is arguably the bulk of development work) favor developers for now. Not to mention that at this point a lot of necessary context is not encoded in an enterprise system, but lives in people's heads.
I'd also flip your framing on its head. One of the advantages of human labor over agents is accountability. Someone needs to own the work at the end of the day, and the incentive alignment is stronger for humans given that there is a real cost to being fired.
For some the appeal of agent over human is the lack of accountability. “Agent, find me ten targets in iran to blow up” - “Okay, great idea! This military strike isn’t just innovative - it’s game changing! A reddit comment from ten years ago says that military often uses schools to hide weapons, so here is a list of the ten most crowded schools in Iran”
> It's not really clear whether Opus 4.5+ represent a level shift on this frontier or just inhabits place on that curve which delivers higher performance, but at rapidly diminishing returns to inference cost.
I think we're reaching the point where more developers need to start right-sizing the model and effort level to the task. It was easy to get comfortable with using the best model at the highest setting for everything for a while, but as the models continue to scale and reasoning token budgets grow, that's no longer a safe default unless you have unlimited budgets.
I welcome the idea of having multiple points on this curve that I can choose from. depending on the task. I'd welcome an option to have an even larger model that I could pull out for complex and important tasks, even if I had to let it run for 60 minutes in the background and made my entire 5-hour token quota disappear in one question.
I know not everyone wants this mental overhead, though. I predict we'll see more attempts at smart routing to different models depending on the task, along with the predictable complaints from everyone when the results are less than predictable.
> It was easy to get comfortable with using the best model at the highest setting for everything for a while, but as the models continue to scale and reasoning token budgets grow, that's no longer a safe default unless you have unlimited budgets.
For a while I used Cerebras Code for 50 USD a month with them running a GLM model and giving you millions of tokens per day. It did a lot of heavy lifting in a software migration I was doing at the time (and made it DOABLE in the first place), BUT there were about 10 different places where the migration got fucked up and had to manually be fixed - files left over after refactoring (what's worse, duplicated ones basically), some constants and routes that are dead code, some development pages that weren't removed when they were superseded by others and so on.
I would say that Claude Code with throwing Opus at most problems (and it using Sonnet or Haiku for sub-agents for simple and well specified tasks) is actually way better, simply because it fucks things up less often and review iterations at least catch when things are going wrong like that. Worse models (and pretty much every one that I can afford to launch locally, even ones that need around ~80 GB of VRAM in the context of an org wanting to self-host stuff) will be confidently wrong and place time bombs in your codebases that you won't even be aware of if you don't pay enough attention to everything - even when the task was rote bullshit that any model worth its salt should have resolved with 0 issues.
My fear is that models that would let me truly be as productive as I want with any degree of confidence might be Mythos tier and the economics of that just wouldn't work out.
The problem is half the time you don't know you need the better model until the lesser model has made a massive mess. Then you have to do it again on the good model, wasting money. The "auto" modes don't seem to do a good job at picking a model IME.
Human dev labor cost is still the high pole in the tent, even multiplying today's subsidized subscription cost by 10x. If the capability improvement trajectory continues, developers should prepare for a new economy where more productivity is achieved by fewer devs by shifting substantial labor budget to AI.
I'm getting a lot more done by handing off the code writing parts of my tasks to many agents running simultaneously. But my attention still has its limits.
> I know not everyone wants this mental overhead, though.
I’m curious how to even do it. I have no idea how to choose which model to use in advance of a given task, regardless of the mental overhead.
And unless you can predict perfectly what you need, there’s going to be some overuse due to choosing the wrong model and having to redo some work with a better model, I assume?
I don't completely agree. Estimation is nontrivial, but not necessarily a random guess. Teams of human engineers have been doing this for decades -- not always with great success, but better than random. Deciding whether to put an intern or your best staff engineer on a problem is a challenge known to any engineering manager and TPM.
That's why you split tasks and do project management 101.
That's how things worked pre-AI, and old problems are new problems again.
When you run any bigger project, you have senior folks who tackle hardest parts of it, experienced folks who can churn out massive amounts of code, junior folks who target smaller/simpler/better scoped problems, etc.
We don't default to tell the most senior engineer "you solve all of those problems". But they're often involved in evaluation/scoping down/breakdown of problem/supervising/correcting/etc.
There's tons of analogies and decades of industry experience to apply here.
They're also getting closer to IPO and have a growing user base. They can't justify losing a very large number of billions of other people's money in their IPO prospectus.
So there's a push for them to increase revenue per user, which brings us closer to the real cost of running these models.
I agree, and I'm also quite skeptical that Anthropic will be able to remain true to its initial, noble mission statement of acting for the global good once they IPO.
At that point you are beholden to your shareholders and no longer can eschew profit in favor of ethics.
Unfortunately, I think this is the beginning of the end of Anthropic and Modei being a company and CEO you could actually get behind and believe that they were trying to do "the right thing".
It will become an increasingly more cutthroat competition between Anthropic and OpenAI (and perhaps Google eventually if they can close the gap between their frontier models and Claude/GPT) to win market share and revenue.
Perhaps Amodei will eventually leave Anthropic too and start yet another AI startup because of Anthropic's seemingly inevitable prioritization of profit over safety.
I think the pivot to profit over good has been happening for a long time. See Dario hyping and salivating over all programming jobs disappearing in N months. He doesn't care at all if it's true or not. In fact he's in a terrible position to even understand if this is possible or not (probably hasn't coded for 10+ years). He's just in the business of selling tokens.
And worse, he (eventually) has to sell tokens above cost - which may have so much "baggage" (read: debt to pay Nvidia) that it'll be nearly impossible; or a new company will come to play with the latest and greatest hardware and undercut them.
Just how if Boeing was able to release a supersonic plane that was also twice as efficient tomorrow; it'd destroy any airline that was deep in debt for its current "now worthless" planes.
Skeptical is a light way to put it. It is essentially a forgone conclusion that once a company IPOs, any veil that they might be working for the global good is entirely lifted.
A publicly traded company is legally obligated to go against the global good.
It’s not really, companies like GM used to boast about how well they treated their employees and communities. It was Jack Welch and a legion of like-minded arseholes who decided they should be increasingly richer no matter who or what paid for it.
This is where PBCs (Public Benefit Companies) and B-Corps may have a role to play. Something like that seems necessary to enable both (A) sufficient profitability to support innovation and viability in a capitalist society and (B) consideration of the public good. Traditional public companies aren't just disincentivized from caring about externalities, they're legally required to maximize shareholder profits, full stop. Which IMHO is a big part of the reason companies ~always become "evil".
The previous deal was due to (a) a lower level of development of capitalism (b) a higher profit margin that collapsed in the 70s (c) a communist movement that threatened capital into behaving
Middle class productive population produces commons goods and resources which gets exploited by Elites. Tragedy of the Commons applied to wealth generation process itself.
A reasonable conclusion, considering that money and power seem to have their own gravity, so people with more of both end up getting even more of both, and vice versa.
Can't blame someone who comes to such a conclusion about money and power.
It’s a sane default to label power as evil in a society driven by greed, usury, and capital gain. Power tends to corrupt, particularly when the incentives driving its pursuit or sustenance undermine scruples or conscientiousness. It is difficult to see how power is not corrupting when it becomes an end in itself, rather than a means directed toward a worthy or noble purpose.
Labeling power evil is not automatic, its just making an observation of the common case. Money-backed power almost never works for the forces of good, and the people who claim they're gonna be good almost always end up being evil when they're rich and powerful enough. See also: Google.
Google is the company that created a class-less non-hierarchical internet. Everyone can get the same access to the same services regardless of wealth or personhood. Google is probably the most progressive company to ever exist, because money stops no one from being able to leverage google's products. Born in the bush of the Congo or high rise of Manhatten, you are granted the same google account with the same services. The cost of entry is just to be a human, one of the most sacrosanct pillars of progressive ideology.
Yet here they are, often considered on of the most evil companies on Earth. That's the interesting quirk.
> Google is the company that created a class-less non-hierarchical internet.
Can you explain what you mean by this? I disagree but I don't understand how you think Google did this so I am very curious.
For my part, I started using the internet before Google, and I strongly hold the opinion that Google's greatest contribution to the internet was utterly destroying its peer to peer, free, open exchange model by being the largest proponent of centralizing and corporatizing the web.
Money and power are good when used democratically to clearly benefit the majority of the people. They are bad otherwise. It is hard to see this because we live in such a regime that exists in the negative space seemingly without beginning or end. Other countries have different relationships to their population.
They're also getting into cloud compute given you can use the desktop app to work in a temporary sandbox that they provision for you.
I was about to call it reselling but so many startups with their fingers in the tech startup pie offer containerised cloud compute akin to a loss leader. Harking back to the old days of buying clock time on a mainframe except you're getting it for free for a while.
The "real cost" of running near-SOTA models is not a secret: you can run local models on your own infrastructure. When you do, you quickly find out that typical agentic coding incurs outsized costs by literal orders of magnitude compared to the simple Q&A chat most people use AI for. All tokens are very much not created equal, and the typical coding token (large model, large noisy context) costs a lot even under best-case caching scenarios.
That sounds very plausible. But it implies they could offer even higher performance models at much higher costs if they chose to; and presumably they would if there were customers willing to pay. Is that the case? Surely there are a decent number of customers who’d be willing to pay more, much more, to get the very best LLMs possible.
Like, Apple computers are already quite pricey -- $1000 or $2000 or so for a decent one. But you can spec up one that’s a bit better (not really that much better) and they’ll charge you $10K, $20K, $30K. Some customers want that and many are willing to pay for it.
Is there an equivalent ultra-high-end LLM you can have if you’re willing to pay? Or does it not exist because it would cost too much to train?
> Is there an equivalent ultra-high-end LLM you can have if you’re willing to pay? Or does it not exist because it would cost too much to train?
I guess at the time that was GPT-4.5. I don't think people used it a lot because it was crazy expensive, and not that much better than the rest of the crop.
I mean, the signs have been there that the costs to run and operate these models wasn't as simple as inference costs. And the signs were there (and, arguably, are still there) that it costs way, way more than many people like to claim on the part of Anthropic. So to me this price hike is not at all surprising. It was going to come eventually, and I suspect it's nowhere near over. It wouldn't surprise me if in 2-3 years the "max" plan is $800 or $2000 even.
I would not be surprised at all, a $1,000/mo tool that makes your $20,000/mo engineer a lot more productive is an easy sell.
I’m guessing we’re gonna have a world like working on cars - most people won’t have expensive tools (ex a full hydraulic lift) for personal stuff, they are gonna have to make do with lesser tools.
> The fact that Anthropic is rapidly trying to increase price may betray the fact that their recent lead is at the cost of dramatically higher operating costs.
Or they are just not willing to burn obscene levels of capital like OpenAI.
IMHO there is a point where incremental model quality will hit diminishing returns.
It is like comparing an 8K display to a 16K display because at normal viewing distance, the difference is imperceptible, but 16K comes at significant premium.
The same applies to intelligence. Sure, some users might register a meaningful bump, but if 99% can't tell the difference in their day-to-day work, does it matter?
A 20-30% cost increase needs to deliver a proportional leap in perceivable value.
I believe that's why 90% of the focus in these firms is on coding. There is a natural difficulty ramp-up that doesn't end anytime soon: you could imagine LLMs creating a line of code, a function, a file, a library, a codebase. The problem gets harder and harder and is still economically relevant very high into the difficulty ladder. Unlike basic natural language queries which saturate difficulty early.
This is also why I don't see the models getting commoditized anytime soon - the dimensionality of LLM output that is economically relevant keeps growing linearly for coding (therefore the possibility space of LLM outputs grows exponentially) which keeps the frontier nontrivial and thus not commoditized.
In contrast, there is not much demand for 100 page articles written by LLMs in response to basic conversational questions, therefore the models are basically commoditized at answering conversational questions because they have already saturated the difficulty/usefulness curve.
> the dimensionality of LLM output that is economically relevant keeps growing linearly for coding
Doubt. Yes. there was at one point it suddenly became useful to write code in a general sense. I have seen almost no improvement in department of architecting, operations and gaslighting. In fact gaslighting has gotten worse. Entire output based on wrong assumption that it hid, almost intentionally. And I had to create very dedicated, non-agentic tools to combat this.
Whenever we get the locally runnable 4k models things are going to get really awkward for the big 3 labs. Well at least Google will still have their ad revenue I guess.
Given how little claude usage they've been giving us on the "pro" plan lately, I've started doing more with the various open Qwen3.* models. Both Qwen3-coder-next and Qwen3.5-27b have been giving me good results and their 3.6 models are starting to be released. I think Anthropic may be shooting themselves in the foot here as more people start moving to local models due to costs and/or availability. Are the Qwen models as good as Claude right now? No. But they're getting close to as good as Claude sonnet was 9 months to a year ago (prior to 4.5, around 4.0). If I need some complex planning I save that for claude and have the Qwen models do the implementation.
I was thinking the exact same thing just now as I load up qwen3.6 into hermes agent and all while fantasizing that it will replace opus 4.7. It might not actually but seems like we're on the verge of that.
Lately I've been wondering too just how large these proprietary "ultra powerful frontier models" really are. It wouldn't shock me if the default models aren't actually just some kind of crazy MoE thing with only a very small number of active params but a huge pool of experts to draw from for world knowledge.
I've also been using the Qwen3.5-27B and the new Qwen3.6 locally, both at Q6. I don't agree that they're as good as pre-Opus Claude. I really like how much they can do on my local hardware, but we have a long way to go before we reach parity with even the pre-Opus Claude in my opinion.
OP’s Qwen3.6 27B Q6 seems to run north of 20GB on huggingface, and should function on an Apple Silicon with 32GB RAM. Smaller models work unreasonably well even on my M1/64GB MacBook.
I am getting 10tok/sec on a 27B of Qwen3.5 (thinking, Q4, 18GB) on an M4/32GB Mac Mini. It’s slow.
For a 9B (much smaller, non-thinking) I am getting 30tok/sec, which is fast enough for regular use if you need something from the training data (like how to use grep or Hemingways favorite cocktail).
I’m using LMStudio, which is very easy and free (beer).
Not who you asked, but I've got a Framework desktop (strix halo) with 128GB RAM. In linux up to about 112GB can be allocated towards the GPU. I can run Qwen3.5-122B (4-bit quant) quite easily on this box. I find qwen3-coder-next (80b param, MOE) runs quite well at about 36tok/sec. Qwen3.5-27b is a bit slower at about ~24tok/sec but that's a dense model.
They're not perfect but the local model game is progressing so quickly that they're impossible to ignore. I've only played around with the new qwen 3.6 models for a few minutes (it's damn impressive) but this weekend's project is to really put it through its paces.
If I can get the performance I'm seeing out of free models on a 6-year-old Macbook Pro M1, it's a sign of things to come.
Frontier models will have their place for 1) extensive integrations and tooling and 2) massive context windows. But I could see a very real local-first near future where a good portion of compute and inference is run locally and only goes to a frontier model as needed.
I've had really good results form qwen3-coder-next. I'm hoping we get a qwen3.6-coder soon since claude seems to get less-and-less available on the pro plan.
If the apple silicon keeps making the gains it makes, a mac studio with 128gb of ram + local models will be a practical all-local workflow by say 2028 or 2030. OpenAI and Anthropic are going to have to offer something really incredible if they want to keep subscription revenue from software developers in the near future, imo
Depends a lot on the task demands. "Got 95% of the way to designing a successful drug" and "Got 100% of the way" is a huge difference in terms of value, and that small bump in intelligence would justify a few orders of magnitude more in cost.
But that objective measure is exactly what we’re lacking in programming: There is often many ways to skin a cat, but the model only takes one. Without knowing about those it didn’t take, how do you judge the quality of a new model?
It probably depends what you're using the models for. If you use them for web search, summarizing web pages, I can imagine there's a plateau and we're probably already hitting it.
For coding though, there is kind of no limit to the complexity of software. The more invariants and potential interactions the model can be aware of, the better presumably. It can handle larger codebases. Probably past the point where humans could work on said codebases unassisted (which brings other potential problems).
For summarizing creative writing, I've found Opus and Gemini 3 pro are still only okay and actively bad once it gets over 15K tokens or so.
A lot of long context and attention improvements have been focused on Needle in a Haystack type scenarios, which is the opposite of what summarization needs.
I'm seeing a lot of sentiment, and agree with a lot of it, that opus 4.6 un-nerfed is there already and for many if not most software use cases there's more value to be had in tooling, speed, and cost than raw model intelligence.
yeah thats is my biggest issue - im okay with paying 20-30% more but what is the ROI? i dont see an equivalent improvement in performance. Anthropic hasnt published any data around what these improvements are - just some vague “better instruction following"
Its enshittificating real fast. They'll just keep releasing model after model, more expensive than the last, marginal gains, but touted as "the next thing". Evangelists will say that they're afraid, it's the future, in 6 months it's all over. Anthropic will keep astroturfing on Reddit. CEOs will make even more outlandish claims.
You raised a good point, what's a good metric for LLM performance? There's surely all the benchmarks out there, but aren't they one and done? Usually at release? What keeps checking the performance of those models. At this point it's just by feel. People say models have been dumbed down, and that's it.
I think the actual future is open source models. Problem is, they don't have the huge marketing budget Anthropic or OpenAI does.
The other thing is most people don't really care about price per token or whatever but how much it will cost to execute (successfully) a task they want.
It doesn't matter if a model is e.g. 30% cheaper to use than another (token-wise) but I need to burn 2x more tokens to get the same acceptable result.
I agree, but also the model intelligence is quite spikey. There are areas of intelligence that I don't care at all about, except as proxies for general improvement (this includes knowledge based benchmarks like Humanity's Last Exam, as well as proving math theorems etc). There are other areas of intelligence where I would gladly pay more, even 10X more, if it meant meaningful improvements: tool use, instruction following, judgement/"common sense", learning from experience, taste, etc. Some of these are seeing some progress, others seem inherent to the current LLM+chain of thought reasoning paradigm.
>IMHO there is a point where incremental model quality will hit diminishing returns.
It's not necessary a single discrete point I think. In my experience, it's tied to the quality/power of your harness and tooling. More powerful tooling has made revealed differences between models that were previously not easy to notice. This matches your display analogy, because I'm essentially saying that the point at which display resolution improvements are imperceptible matters on how far you sit.
Does anyone here use 8k display for work? Does it make sense over 4k?
I was always wondering where that breaking point for cost/peformance is for displays. I use 4K 27” and it’s noticeably much better for text than 1440p@27 but no idea if the next/ and final stop is 6k or 8k?
Even 4k turns out to be overkill if you're looking at the whole screen and a pixel-perfect display. By human visual acuity, 1440p ought to be enough, and even that's taking a safety margin over 1080p to account for the crispness of typical text.
1440p is enough if you haven't experienced anything else. Even the jump from 4k to 5-6k is quite noticeable on a 27" monitor.
I switched to the Studio Display XDR and it is noticeably better than my 4k displays and my 1440p displays feel positively ancient and near unusable for text.
The "multiplier" on Github Copilot went from 3 to 7.5. Nice to see that it is actually only 20-30% and Microsoft wanting to lose money slightly slower.
Yep, and I just made a recommendation that was essentially "never enable Opus 4.7" to my org as a direct result. We have Opus 4.6 (3x) and Opus 4.5 (3x) enabled currently. They are worth it for planning.
At 7.5x for 4.7, heck no. It isn't even clear it is an upgrade over Opus 4.6.
> Over the coming weeks, Opus 4.7 will replace Opus 4.5 and Opus 4.6 in the model picker for Copilot Pro+.
> This model is launching with a 7.5× premium request multiplier as part of promotional pricing until April 30th
TBF, it's a rumour that they are switching to per-token price in May, but it's from an insider (apparently), and seeing how good of a deal the current per-request pricing is, everyone expects them to bump prices sometime soon or switch to per-token pricing.
I don't know how you guys are not seeing 4.7 as an upgrade, it just does so much more, so much better. I guess lower complexity tasks are saturated though.
Opus 4.6 also just got dumber. It's dismissive, hand-wavy, jumps to conclusions way too quickly, skips reasoning... Bubble is going to burst, either some big breakthrough comes up or we are going to see a very fast enshittificafion.
I find it interesting that folks are so focused on cost for AI models. Human time spent redirecting AI coding agents towards better strategies and reviewing work, remains dramatically more expensive than the token cost for AI coding, for anything other than hobby work (where you're not paying for the human labor). $200/month is an expensive hobby, but it's negligible as a business expense; SalesForce licenses cost far more.
The key question is how well it a given model does the work, which is a lot harder to measure. But I think token costs are still an order of magnitude below the point where a US-based developer using AI for coding should be asking questions about price; at current price points, the cost/benefit question is dominated by what makes the best use of your limited time as an engineer.
The title is a misdirection. The token counts may be higher, but the cost-per-task may not be for a given intelligence level. Need to wait to see Artificial Analysis' Intelligence Index run for this, or some other independent per-task cost analysis.
The final calculation assumes that Opus 4.7 uses the exact same trajectory + reasoning output as Opus 4.6.
I have not verified, but I assume it not to be the case, given that Opus 4.7 on Low thinking is strictly better than Opus 4.6 on Medium, etc., etc.
I ran an internal (oil and gas focused) benchmark yesterday and found Opus 4.7 was 50% cheaper than Opus 4.6, driven by significantly fewer output tokens for reasoning. It also scored 80% (vs. 60%).
yep, ran a controlled experiment on 28 tasks comparing old opus 4.6 vs new opus 4.6 vs 4.7, and found that 4.7 is comparable in cost to old 4.6, and ~20% more expensive then new 4.6 (because new 4.6 is thinking less)
im running some experiments on this but based on what i have seen on my own personal data - I dont think this is true
"given that Opus 4.7 on Low thinking is strictly better than Opus 4.6 on Medium, etc., etc.”
Opus 4.7 in general is more expensive for similar usage. Now we can argue that is provides better performance all else being equal but I haven’t been able to see that
Very unlikely that the article is wrong. the 4.7 intelligence bump is not that big, plus most of the token spend is in inputs/tool calls etc, much of which won't change even with this bump.
My workloads generate ~5x more output than input, and output tokens cost 5x more per token... output dominates my bill at roughly 25x the cost of input. (Even more so when you consider cache hits!)
If Opus 4.7 was more efficient with reasoning (and thus output), I'd likely save considerable money (were I paying per-token).
In Kolkata, sweet sellers was struggling with cost management after covid due to increased prices of raw materials. But they couldn't increase the price any further without losing customers. So they reduced the size of sweets instead, and market slowly reduced expectations. And this is the new normal now.
Human psychology is surprisingly similar, and same pattern comes across domains.
A question I've been asking alot lately (really since the release of GPT-5.3) is "do I really need the more powerful model"?
I think a big issue with the industry right now is it's constantly chasing higher performing models and that comes at the cost of everything else. What I would love to see in the next few years is all these frontier AI labs go from just trying to create the most powerful model at any cost to actually making the whole thing sustainable and focusing on efficiency.
The GPT-3 era was a taste of what the future could hold but those models were toys compare to what we have today. We saw real gains during the GPT-4 / Claude 3 era where they could start being used as tools but required quite a bit of oversight. Now in the GPT-5 / Claude 4 era I don't really think we need to go much further and start focusing on efficiency and sustainability.
What I would love the industry to start focusing on in the next few years is not on the high end but the low end. Focus on making the 0.5B - 1B parameter models better for specific tasks. I'm currently experimenting with fine-tuning 0.5B models for very specific tasks and long term I think that's the future of AI.
Yes! I'd be totally happy with today's sonnet 4.6 if I could run it locally.
If you can forgive the obviously-AI-generated writing, [CPUs Aren't Dead](https://seqpu.com/CPUsArentDead) makes an interesting point on AI progress: Google's latest, smallest Gemma model (Gemma 4 E2B), which can run on a cell phone, outperforms GPT-3.5-turbo.
Granted, this factoid is based on `MT-Bench` performance, a benchmark from 2023 which I assume to be both fully saturated and leaked into the training data for modern LLMs.
However, cross-referencing [Artificial Analysis' Intelligence Index](https://artificialanalysis.ai/models?models=gemma-4-e2b-non-...) suggests that indeed the latest 2B open-weights models are capable of matching or beating 175B models from 3-4 years ago.
Perhaps more impressive, [Gemma 4 E4B matches or beats GPT-4o](https://artificialanalysis.ai/models?models=gemma-4-e4b%2Cge...) on many benchmarks.
If this trend continues, perhaps we'll have the capabilities of today's best models available to reasonably run on our laptops!
Efficiency doesn't make as much money. It's in big LLM's best interest to keep inference computationally expensive.
I personally think the whole "the newest model is crazy! You've gotta use X (insert most expensive model)" Is just FOMO and marketing-prone people just parroting whatever they've seen in the news or online.
You can already see people here saying the same stuff about opus 4.7, saw a comment claiming that Opus 4.7 on low thinking was better than 4.6 on high.
I'm not seeing that in my testing, but these opinions are all vibe based anyway.
Does everyone need a graphing calculator? Does everyone need a scientific calculator? Does everyone need a normal calculator? Does everyone need GeoGebra or Desmos ?
I agree, and yet here i am using it... However, I think the industry IS going multiple directions all at once with smaller models, bigger models etc. I need to try out Google's latest models but alas what can one person do in the face of so many new models...
It appears that they are testing using Max. For 4.7 Anthropic recognizes the high token usage of max and recommends the new xhigh mode for most cases. So I think the real question is whether 4.7 xhigh is “better” than 4.6 max.
> max: Max effort can deliver performance gains in some use cases, but may show diminishing returns from increased token usage. This setting can also sometimes be prone to overthinking. We recommend testing max effort for intelligence-demanding tasks.
> xhigh (new): Extra high effort is the best setting for most coding and agentic use cases
Just yesterday I was happy to have gotten my weekly limit reset [1]. And although I've been doing a lot of mockup work (so a lot of HTML getting written), I think the 1M token stuff is absolutely eating up tokens like CRAZY.
My personal Claude sub (Pro), I can burn through my limit in a couple of hours when using Opus. It's borderline unusable unless you're willing to pay for extended usage or artificially slow yourself down.
I'm seeing the opposite. With Opus 4.7 and xhigh, I'm seeing less session usage , it's moving faster, and my weekly usage is not moving that much on a Team Pro account.
Anthropic intruduces fake tool calls to prevent distillation of their models. Others still distill. Anthropic distils third party models. Claude now hallucinates tools.
> I'm already at 27% of my weekly limit in ONE DAY.
Ouch, that's very different than experience. What effort level? Are you careful to avoid pushing session context use beyond 350k or so (assuming 1m context)?
Yeah fair point. I have had a couple of conversations (ingesting a pretty complex domain and creating about 42 high fidelity tailwind mockups with ui.sh).
And this particular set of things has context routinely hit 350-450k before I compact.
That's likely what it is? I think this particular work stream is eating a lot of tokens.
Earlier this week (before Open 4.7 hit), I just turned off 1m context and had it grow a lot slower.
I also have it on high all the time. Medium was starting to feel like it was making the occasional bad decisions and also forgetting things more.
I'm mind blown people are complaining about token consumption and not communicating what thinking level they're using - if cost is a concern and you're paying any attention, you'd be starting with medium and seeing if you can get better results with less tokens. Every person complaining about token usage seem to have no methodology - probably using max and completely oblivious.
It's unsurprising when this is the first day that tokens have been crazy like this.
All of us doing crazy agentic stuff were fine on max before this. Now with Opus 4.7, we're no longer fine, and troubleshooting, and working through options.
Ya...you may be who I'm talking about though (if you're speaking from experience). If your methodology is "I used 4.6 max, so I'm going to try 4.7 max" this is fully on you - 4.7 max is not equivalent to 4.6 max, you want 4.7 xhigh.
From their docs:
max: Max effort can deliver performance gains in some use cases, but may show diminishing returns from increased token usage. This setting can also sometimes be prone to overthinking. We recommend testing max effort for intelligence-demanding tasks.
xhigh (new): Extra high effort is the best setting for most coding and agentic use cases.
Ah - xhigh is probably what you want. Their docs suggest xhigh for agentic coding, though judging by their blog high should be better than 4.6 max (ymmv)
I've always used high, so maybe I should be using xhigh
Asked Opus 4.7 to extend an existing system today. After thorough exploration and a long back and forth on details it came up with a plan. Then proceeded to build a fully parallel, incompatible system from scratch with the changes I wanted but everything else incompatible and full of placeholders
I tried to do my usual test (similar to pelican but a bit more complex) but it ran out of 5 hour limit in 5 minutes. Then after 5 hours I said "go on" and the results were the worst I've ever seen.
Claude code seems to be getting worse on several fronts and better on others. I suspect product is shifting from 'make it great' to 'make it make as much money for us as possible and that includes gathering data'.
Recently it started promoting me for feedback even though I am on API access and have disabled this. When I did a deep dive of their feedback mechanism in the past (months ago so probably changed a lot since then) the feedback prompt was pushing message ids even if you didn't respond. If you are on API usage and have told them no to training on your data then anything pushing a message id implies that it is leaking information about your session. It is hard to keep auditing them when they push so many changes so I am now 'default they are stealing my info' instead of believing their privacy/data use policy claims. Basically, my level of trust is eroding fast in their commitment to not training on me and I am paying a premium to not have that happen.
On actual code, I see what you see a 30% increase in tokens which is in-line with what they claim as well. I personally don't tend to feed technical documentation or random pros into llms.
Given that Opus 4.6 and even Sonnet 4.6 are still valid options, for me the question is not "Does 4.7 cost more than claimed?" but "What capabilities does 4.7 give me that 4.6 did not?"
Yesterday 4.6 was a great option and it is too soon for me to tell if 4.7 is a meaningful lift. If it is, then I can evaluate if the increased cost is justified.
Yeah that was an interesting discovery in a development meeting. Many people were chasing after the next best model and everything, though for me, Sonnet 4.6 solves many topics in 1-2 rounds. I mainly need some focus on context, instructions and keeping tasks well-bounded. Keeping the task narrow also simplifies review and staying in control, since I usually get smaller diffs back I can understand quickly and manage or modify later.
I'll look at the new models, but increasing the token consumptions by a factor of 7 on copilot, and then running into all of these budget management topics people talk about? That seems to introduce even more flow-breakers into my workflow, and I don't think it'll be 7 times better. Maybe in some planning and architectural topics where I used Opus 4.6 before.
I will be the first to acknowledge that humans are a bad judge of performance and that some of the allegations are likely just hallucinations...
But... Are you really going to completely rely on benchmarks that have time and time again be shown to be gamed as the complete story?
My take: It is pretty clear that the capacity crunch is real and the changes they made to effort are in part to reduce that. It likely changed the experience for users.
While that's a nice effort, the inter-run variability is too high to diagnose anything short of catastrophic model degradation. The typical 95% confidence interval runs from 35% to 65% pass rates, a full factor of two performance difference.
Moreover, on the companion codex graphs (https://marginlab.ai/trackers/codex-historical-performance/), you can see a few different GPT model releases marked yet none correspond to a visual break in the series. Either GPT 5.4-xhigh is no more powerful than GPT 5.2, or the benchmarking apparatus is not sensitive enough to detect such changes.
Yes, MarginLab only tests 50 tasks a day, which is too few to give a narrower confidence interval. On the other hand, this really calls into question claims of performance degradation that are based on less intensive use than that. Variance is just so high that long streaks of bad luck are to be expected and plausibly the main source of such complaints. Similarly, it's unlikely you can measure a significant performance difference between models like GPT 5.4-xhigh and GPT 5.2 unless you have a task where one of them almost always fails or one almost always succeeds (thus guaranteeing low variance), or you make a lot of calls (i.e. probably through the API and not in interactive mode.)
How long will they host 4.6? Maybe longer for enterprise, but if you have a consumer subscription, you won't have a choice for long, if at all anymore.
I was trying to figure out earlier today how to get 4.6 to run in Claude Code, as part of the output it included "- Still fully supported — not scheduled for retirement until Feb 2027." Full caveat of, I don't know where it came up with this information, but as others have said, 4.5 is still available today and it is now 5, almost 6 months old.
We noticed this two weeks ago where we found some of our requests are unexpected took more tokens than measured by count_tokens call. At the end they were Anthropic's A/B testing routing some Opus 4.6 calls to Opus 4.7.
I work at a company that has gone all in on Anthropic, and we're just shoveling money at them. I suspect there are a more enterprises than we realize that are doing this.
When I read these comments on Hacker News, I see a lot of people miffed about their personal subscription limits. I think this is a viewpoint that is very consumer focused, and probably within Anthropic they're seeing buckets of money being dumped on them from enterprises. They probably don't really care as much about the individual subscription user, especially power users.
1. HN is so unrepresentative of real life. You have people on their $20/$200 subscriptions complaining about usage limits. They are a tiny fraction of Anthropic's revenue. API billing and enterprise is where the money is.
2. Anthropic and OpenAI's financials are totally different. The former has nearly the same RRR and a fraction of the cash burn. There is a reason Anthropic is hot on secondary and OAI isn't
This is the backdoor way of raising prices... just inflate the token pricing. It's like ice cream companies shrinking the box instead of raising the price
No, you're forgetting the never ending world shattering models being released every couple of months. Each one with 2X token costs of course, for a vague performance gain and that will deprecate the previous ones.
"One session" is not a very interesting unit of work. What I am interested in is how much less work I am required to do, to get the results I want.
This is not so much about my instructions being followed more closely. It's the LLM being smarter about what's going on and for example saving me time on unnecessary expeditions. This is where models have been most notably been getting better to my experience. Understanding the bigger picture. Applying taste.
It's harder to measure, of course, but, at least for my coding needs, there is still a lot of room here.
If one session costs an additional 20% that's completely fine, if that session gets me 20% closer to a finished product (or: not 20% further away). Even 10% closer would probably still be entirely fine, given how cheap it is.
Yeah. I just did a day with 4.7 and I won't be going back for a while. It is just too expensive. On top of the tokenization the thinking seems like it is eating a lot more too.
choice is often a great dark-pattern (lack of choice is too but...). Choices generally grow cost to discover optimality in an np way. This means if the entity giving choice has more ability to compute the value prop than the entity deciding the choice you can easily create an exploitive system. Just create a bunch of choices, some actually do save money with enough thought but most don't, and you will gain:
People that think they got what they wanted, the feature is there!, so they can't complain but...
People that end up essentially randomly picking so the average value of the choices made by customers is suboptimal.
Once you've seen a few results of an LLM given too much sway over product decisions, 5 effort modes expressed as various english adjectives is pretty much par for the course
Not only that but they seem to have cut my plan ability to use Sonnet too. I have a routine that used to use about 40% of my 5 hour max plan tokens, then since yesterday it gets stopped because it uses the whole 100%. Anyone else experience this?
yeah it seems like sonnet 4.6 burns thru tokens crazy fast. I did one prompt, sonnet misunderstood it as 'generate an image of this' and used all of my free tokens.
Claude seems so frustrating lately to the point where I avoid and completely ignore it. I can't identify a single cause but I believe it's mostly the self-righteousness and leadership that drive all the decisions that make me distrust and disengage with it.
Some broad assumptions are being made that plans give you a precise equivalent to API cost. This is not the case with reverse engineering plan usage showing cached input is free [0]. If you re-run the math removing cached input the usage cost is ~5-34% more. Was the token plan budget increase [1] proportional to account for this? Can’t say with certainty. Those paying API costs though the price hike is real.
Interesting because I already felt like current models spit out too much garbage verbose code that a human would write in a far more terse, beautiful and grokable way
I had a case yesterday where Claude wrote me a series of if/elses in python. I asked it if it could use some newer constructs instead, and it told me that I was on a new enough python version that I could use match/case. Great!
And then it proceeded to rewrite the block with a dict lookup plus if-elses, instead of using match/case. I had to nag it to actually rewrite the code the way it said it would!
Every time a new model comes out, I'm left guessing what it means for my token budget in order to sustain the quality of output I'm getting. And it varies unpredictably each time. Beyond token efficiency, we need benchmarks to measure model output quality per token consumed for a diverse set of multi-turn conversation scenarios. Measuring single exchanges is not just synthetic, it's unrealistic. Without good cost/quality trade-off measures, every model upgrade feels like a gamble.
The company I work for provides all engineering employees with a Claude subscription. My job isn't writing (much) code, and we have Copilot with MS Office, plus multiple internal AI tools on top of that. So I'm free to do low-stakes experiments on Claude without having to worry about hitting my monthly usage limit.
I am finding that for complex tasks, Claude's quality of output varies _tremendously_ with repeated runs of the same model and prompt. For example, last week I wrote up (with my own brain and keyboard) a somewhat detailed plain english spec of a work-related productivity app that I've always wanted but never had the time to write. It was roughly the length of an average college essay. The first thing I asked Claude to do was not write any code, but come up with a more formal design and implementation plan based on the requirements that I gave. The idea was to then hand _that_ to Claude and say, okay, now build it.
I used Opus 4.6 with High reasoning for all of this and did not change any model settings between runs.
The first run was overall _amazing_. It was detailed, well-written, contained everything that I asked for. The only drawback was that I was ambiguous on a couple of points which meant that the model went off and designed something in a way that I wasn't expecting and didn't intend. So I cleared that up in my prompt, and instead of keeping the context and building on what was already there, I started a new chat and had it start again from scratch.
What it wrote the second time was _far_ less impressive. The writing was terse, there was a lot less detail, the pretty dependency charts and various tables it made the first time were all gone. Lots of stuff was underspecified or outright missing.
New chat, start again. Similar results as the second run, maybe a bit worse. It also started _writing code_ which was something I told it NOT to do. At this point I'm starting to panic a little because I'm sure I didn't add, "oh, and make it crappy" to the prompt and I was a little angry about not saving the first iteration since it was fairly close to what I had wanted anyway.
I decided to try one last time and it finally gave me back something within about 95% of the first run in terms of quality, but with all the problems fixed. So, I was (finally) happy with that, and it used that to generate the application surprisingly well, with only a few issues that should not be too hard to fix after the fact.
So I guess 4th time was a charm, and the fare was about $7 in tokens to get there.
That’s the joy of purchasing an intangible and non-deterministic product. The profit margin is completely within the vendor’s control and quality is hard for users to measure.
Anybody else having problem getting Opus 4.7 to write code? I had it pick up a month-old project, some small one off scripts that I want to modify, and it refused to even touch the code.
So far it costs a lot less, because I'm not going to be using it.
On the contrary, I threw a multi-threading optimization task on it, that 4.5 and 4.6 have been pretty useless at handling. 4.7 bested my hand-tuned solution by almost 2x on first attempt.
This was what I thought was my best moat as a senior dev. No other model has been able to come close to the throughput I could achieve on my own before. Might be a fluke of course, and they've picked up a few patterns in training that applies to this particular problem and doesn't generalize. We'll see.
No, see, we have to leave writing code to fully identity-verified individuals working on behalf of only the largest institutions now because what if they decided to write malware?
Well, LLMs are priced per token, and most of the tokens are just echoing back the old code with minimal changes. So, a lot of the cost is actually paying for the LLM to echo back the same code.
Except, it's not that trivial to solve. I tried experimenting with asking the model to first give a list of symbols it will modify, and then just write the modified symbols. The results were OK, but less refined than when it echoes back the entire file.
The way I see it is that when you echo back the entire file, the process of thinking "should I do an edit here" is distributed over a longer span, so it has more room to make a good decision. Like instead of asking "which 2 of the 10 functions should you change" you're asking it "should you change method1? what about method2? what about method3?", etc., and that puts less pressure on the LLM.
Except, currently we are effectively paying for the LLM to make that decision for *every token*, which is terribly inefficient. So, there has to be some middle ground between expensively echoing back thousands of unchanged tokens and giving an error-ridden high-level summary. We just haven't found that middle ground yet.
I think the ideal way for these LLMs to work will be using AST-level changes instead of "let me edit this file".
grit.io was working on this years ago, not sure if they are still alive/around, but I liked their approach (just had a very buggy transformer/language).
They can, but this reduces the quality. The LLM has a harder time picking the first edit, and then all subsequent work is influenced by that one edit. Like first creating an unnecessary auxiliary type, and then being stuck modifying the rest of the code to work with it.
So, in practice, many tools still work on the file level.
I've been using 4.6 models since each of them launched.
Same for 4.5.
4.6 performers worse or the same in most of the tasks I have.
If there is a parameter that made me use 4.6 more frequently is because 4.5 get dumber and not because 4.6 seemed smarter.
News like this always makes me wonder about running my own model, something I've never done. A couple thousand bucks can get you some decent hardware, it looks like, but is it good for coding? What is your all's experience?
And if it's not good enough for coding, what kind of money, if any, would make it good enough?
I want to give give you realistic expectations: Unless you spend well over $10K on hardware, you will be disappointed, and will spend a lot of time getting there. For sophisticated coding tasks, at least. (For simple agentic work, you can get workable results with a 3090 or two, or even a couple 3060 12GBs for half the price. But they're pretty dumb, and it's a tease. Hobby territory, lots of dicking around.)
Do yourself a favor: Set up OpenCode and OpenRouter, and try all the models you want to try there.
Other than the top performers (e.g. GLM 5.1, Kimi K2.5, where required hardware is basically unaffordable for a single person), the open models are more trouble than they're worth IMO, at least for now (in terms of actually Getting Shit Done).
We need more voices like this to cut through the bullshit. It's fine that people want to tinker with local models, but there has been this narrative for too long that you can just buy more ram and run some small to medium sized model and be productive that way. You just can't, a 35b will never perform at the level of the same gen 500b+ model. It just won't and you are basically working with GPT-4 (the very first one to launch) tier performance while everyone else is on GPT-5.4. If that's fine for you because you can stay local, cool, but that's the part that no one ever wants to say out loud and it made me think I was just "doing it wrong" for so long on lm studio and ollama.
> We need more voices like this to cut through the bullshit.
Open models are not bullshit, they work fine for many cases and newer techniques like SSD offload make even 500B+ models accessible for simple uses (NOT real-time agentic coding!) on very limited hardware. Of course if you want the full-featured experience it's going to cost a lot.
My anecdotal experience with a recent project (Python library implemented and released to pypi).
I took the plan that I used from Codex and handed it to opencode with Qwen 3.5 running locally.
It created a library very similar to Codex but took 2x longer.
I haven't tried Qwen 3.6 but I hear it's another improvement. I'm confident with my AI skills that if/when cheap/subsidized models go away, I'll be fine running locally.
Not sure why all the other commentors are failing to mention you can spend considerably less money on an apple silicon machine to run decent local models.
Fun fact: AWS offers apple silicon EC2 instances you can spin up to test.
The latest Qwen3.6 model is very impressive for its size. Get an RTX 3090 and go to https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/ to see the latest news on how to run models locally. Totally fine for coding.
You should be aware that any model you can run on less than $10k worth of hardware isn't going to be anywhere close to the best cloud models on any remotely complex task.
Many providers out there host open weights models for cheap, try them out and see what you think before actually investing in hardware to run your own.
Claude's tokenizers have actually been getting less efficient over the years (I think we're at the third iteration at the least since Sonnet 3.5). And if you prompt the LLM in a language other than English, or if your users prompt it or generate content in other languages, the costs go higher even more. And I mean hundreds of percent more for languages with complex scripts like Tamil or Japanese. If you're interested in the research we did comparing tokenizers of several SOTA models in multiple languages, just hit me up.
It does cost more but I found the quality of output much higher. I prefer it over the dumbing of effort/models they were doing for the last two months. They have to get users used to picking the appropriate model for their task (or have an automatic mode - but still let me force it to a model).
Good lord. Reading all these comments makes me feel so much better for dumping anthropic the first time their opus started becoming dumber (circa Month ago). It feels like most people in this thread are somehow bound to Claude, even though it is alread fully enshittfied.
Yeah I noticed today, I had it work up a spreadsheet for me and I only got 3 or 4 turns in the conversation before it used up all my (pro) credits. It wasn't even super-complicated or anything, only moderately so.
I noticed it was compacting more aggressively which i actually like, because i was letting sessions get really long and using them uncached (parallel sessions)
So intelligence has turned into a utility per Sam Altman et al., and now the same companies get to hike the price of accessing it by 20–30%, right as it’s becoming the backbone of how teams actually ship work. People are pushing out so much, so fast that last week’s output is already a blur. I’ve got colleagues who refuse to go back to writing any of this stuff by hand.
And now maintaining that pace means absorbing arbitrary price increases, shrugged off with “we were operating at a loss anyway.”
It stops being “pay to play” and starts looking more like pay just to stay in the ring, while enterprise players barely feel the hit and everyone else gets squeezed out.
Market maturing my butthole... it’s obviously a dependency being priced in real time. Tech is an utter shit show right now, compounded by the disaster of the unemployment market still reeling from the overhiring of 2020.
"Utility" is close, but "energy source" may be closer. When it becomes the thing powering the pace of work itself, raising prices is less about charging for access and more about taxing dependency.
No, that's not my point. My point is that AI looks like something fairly unique in today's landscape: a resource that almost everyone is starting to depend on. It's a bit like the Internet, except usage is metered, and paying more can improve the quality of the result for the same underlying task, such as cybersecurity.
In this context I also imagine we will have greater and greater local models, and the (dependency) ending game is completely unclear.
Don't forget that the model doesn't have an incentive to give right solution the first time. At least with Opus 4.6 after it got nerfed, it would go round in circles until you tell it to stop defrauding you and get to correct solution. That not always worked though. I found starting session again and again until less nerfed model was put on the request. Still all points to artificially make customer pay more.
For me there is no point in using Claude Opus 4.7, it's too expensive since it does not do 100% of the job. Since AI can anyway only do 90% of most tasks, I can use another model and do the remaining 15-30% myself.
Contrary to people here who feel the price increases, reduction of subscription limits etc are the result of the Anthropic models being more expensive to run than the API & subscription revenue they generate I have a theory that Anthropic has been in the enshittification & rent seeking phase for a while in which they will attempt to extract as much money out of existing users as possible.
Commercial inference providers serve Chinese models of comparable quality at 0.1x-0.25x. I think Anthropic realised that the game is up and they will not be able to hold the lead in quality forever so it's best to switch to value extraction whilst that lead is still somewhat there.
But let's say for the sake of discussion Opus is much better - still doesn't justify the price disparity especially when considering that other models are provided by commercial inference providers and anthropics is inhouse.
Try doing real work with them, it's night and day difference especially for systems programming. The non-frontier models to a lot of benchmaxxing to look good.
30% more token use, but even by their benchmarks, don't appear to have any real big successes there, and some regressions. What's the point? It doesn't do any better on the suite of obedience/compliance tests I've written for 4.6, and in some tests, got worse, despite their claim there it is better. Anecdotally, it was gobbling so many tokens on even the simplest queries I immediately shut it off and went back to 4.5.
As a regular listener of Ed Zitron this comes as absolutely no surprise. Once you understand the levels of obfuscation available to anthro / OAI you will realize that they have almost certainly hit a model plateau ~1 year ago. All benchmark improvements since have come at a high compute cost. And the model used when evaluating said benchmarks is not the same model you get with your subscription.
This is already becoming apparent as users are seeing quality degrade which implies that anthropic is dropping performance across the board to minimize financial losses.
In my “repo os” we have an adversarial agent harness running gpt5.4 for plan and implementation and opus4.6 for review. This was the clear winner in the bake-off when 5.4 came out a couple months ago.
Re-ran the bake-off with 4.7 authoring and… gpt5.4 still clearly winning. Same skills, same prompts, same agents.md.
Am I dumb, or are they not explaining what level thinking they're using? We all read the Anthropic blog post yesterday - 4.7 max consumes/produces an incredible number of tokens and it's not equivalent to 4.6 max; xhigh is the new "max".
I was sort of hoping that the peak is something like $15 per hour of vibe help (yes I know some of you burn $15 in 12milliseconds), and that you can have last year's best or the current "nano/small" model at $1 per hour.
But it looks like it's just creeping up. Probably because we're paying for construction, not just inference right now.
I don't know anything about tokens. Anthropic says Pro has "more usage*", Max has 5x or 20x "more usage*" than Pro. The link to "usage limits" says "determines how many messages you can send". Clearly no one is getting billed for tokens.
The fundamental problem with these frontier model companies is that they're incentivized to create models that burn through more tokens, full stop. It's a tale as old as capitalism: you wake up every day and choose to deliver more value to your customers or your shareholders, you cannot do both simultaneously forever.
People love to throw around "this is the dumbest AI will ever be", but the corollary to that is "this is the most aligned the incentives between model providers and customers will ever be" because we're all just burning VC money for now.
> The fundamental problem with these frontier model companies is that they're incentivized to create models that burn through more tokens
That's one market segment - the high priced one, but not necessarily the most profitable one. Ferrari's 2025 income was $2B while Toyota's was $30B.
Maybe a more apt comparison is Sun Microsystems vs the PC Clone market. Sun could get away with high prices until the PC Clones became so fast (coupled with the rise of Linux) that they ate Sun's market and Sun went out of business.
There may be a market for niche expensive LLMs specialized for certain markets, but I'll be amazed if the mass coding market doesn't become a commodity one with the winners being the low cost providers, either in terms of API/subscriptions costs, or licensing models for companies to run on their own (on-prem or cloud) servers.
> but the corollary to that is "this is the most aligned the incentives between model providers and customers will ever be" because we're all just burning VC money for now.
Please say this louder for everyone to hear. We are still at the stage where it is best for Anthropic's product to be as consumer aligned (and cost-friendly) as possible. Anthropic is loosing a lot of money. Both of those things will not be true in the near future.
Their bigger incentive is to deliver the best product in the cheapest way, because there is tight competition with at least 2 other companies. I know we all love to hate on capitalism but it's actually functioning fine in this situation, and the token inflation is their attempt to provide a better product, not a worse one.
> The compute is expensive, what is with this outrage?
Gamblers (vibe-coders) at Anthropic's casino realising that their new slot machine upgrade (Claude Opus) is now taking 20%-30% more credits for every push of the spin button.
Problem is, it advertises how good it is (unverified benchmarks) and has a better random number generator but it still can be rigged (made dumber) by the vendor (Anthropic).
The house (Anthropic) always wins.
> People just want free tools forever?
Using local models are the answer to this if you want to use AI models free forever.
Seeing this big crowd of people trying to persuade themselves or others that the ever growing hole in their pockets is totally justified and beneficial is pretty hilarious!
Today we are almost on non-speaking terms. I'm asking it to do some simple stuff and he's making incredible stupid mistakes:
and at the same time the compacting is firing like crazy. (What adds ~4 minute delays every 1 - 15 minutes) Bottomline, I will probably stay on Sonnet until they fix all these issues.I'm curious, how does using more tokens save compute?
both Anthropic and OpenAI quantize their models a few weeks after release. they'd never admit it out loud, but it's more or less common knowledge now. no one has enough compute.
> You're right, that was a shit explanation. Let me go look at what V1 MTBL actually is before I try again.
> Got it — I read the V1 code this time instead of guessing. Turns out my first take was wrong in an important way. Let me redo this in English.
:facepalm:
Does the LLM even keep a (self-accessible) record of previous internal actions to make this assertion believable, or is this yet another confabulation?
The weird stuff is yesterday I asked it to test and report back on a 30+ commit branch for a PR and it did that flawlessly.
To me, it is hard to reject this hypothesis today. The fact that Anthropic is rapidly trying to increase price may betray the fact that their recent lead is at the cost of dramatically higher operating costs. Their gross margins in this past quarter will be an important data point on this.
I think the tendency for graphs of model assessment to display the log of cost/tokens on the x axis (i.e. Artificial Analysis' site) has obscured this dynamic.
The power dynamics are also vastly against me. I represent a fraction of my employer's labour, but my employer represents 100% of my income.
That dynamic is totally inverted with AI. You are a rounding error on their revenue sheet, they have a monopoly on your work throughput. How do you budget an workforce that could turn 20% more expensive overnight?
This is why there are a ton of corps running the open source models in house... Known costs, known performance, upgrade as you see fit. The consumer backlash against 4o was noted by a few orgs, and they saw the writing on the wall... they didnt want to develop against a platform built on quicksand (see openweb, apps on Facebook and a host of other examples).
There are people out there making smart AI business decisions, to have control over performance and costs.
I'd also flip your framing on its head. One of the advantages of human labor over agents is accountability. Someone needs to own the work at the end of the day, and the incentive alignment is stronger for humans given that there is a real cost to being fired.
I think we're reaching the point where more developers need to start right-sizing the model and effort level to the task. It was easy to get comfortable with using the best model at the highest setting for everything for a while, but as the models continue to scale and reasoning token budgets grow, that's no longer a safe default unless you have unlimited budgets.
I welcome the idea of having multiple points on this curve that I can choose from. depending on the task. I'd welcome an option to have an even larger model that I could pull out for complex and important tasks, even if I had to let it run for 60 minutes in the background and made my entire 5-hour token quota disappear in one question.
I know not everyone wants this mental overhead, though. I predict we'll see more attempts at smart routing to different models depending on the task, along with the predictable complaints from everyone when the results are less than predictable.
For a while I used Cerebras Code for 50 USD a month with them running a GLM model and giving you millions of tokens per day. It did a lot of heavy lifting in a software migration I was doing at the time (and made it DOABLE in the first place), BUT there were about 10 different places where the migration got fucked up and had to manually be fixed - files left over after refactoring (what's worse, duplicated ones basically), some constants and routes that are dead code, some development pages that weren't removed when they were superseded by others and so on.
I would say that Claude Code with throwing Opus at most problems (and it using Sonnet or Haiku for sub-agents for simple and well specified tasks) is actually way better, simply because it fucks things up less often and review iterations at least catch when things are going wrong like that. Worse models (and pretty much every one that I can afford to launch locally, even ones that need around ~80 GB of VRAM in the context of an org wanting to self-host stuff) will be confidently wrong and place time bombs in your codebases that you won't even be aware of if you don't pay enough attention to everything - even when the task was rote bullshit that any model worth its salt should have resolved with 0 issues.
My fear is that models that would let me truly be as productive as I want with any degree of confidence might be Mythos tier and the economics of that just wouldn't work out.
I’m curious how to even do it. I have no idea how to choose which model to use in advance of a given task, regardless of the mental overhead.
And unless you can predict perfectly what you need, there’s going to be some overuse due to choosing the wrong model and having to redo some work with a better model, I assume?
That's how things worked pre-AI, and old problems are new problems again.
When you run any bigger project, you have senior folks who tackle hardest parts of it, experienced folks who can churn out massive amounts of code, junior folks who target smaller/simpler/better scoped problems, etc.
We don't default to tell the most senior engineer "you solve all of those problems". But they're often involved in evaluation/scoping down/breakdown of problem/supervising/correcting/etc.
There's tons of analogies and decades of industry experience to apply here.
So there's a push for them to increase revenue per user, which brings us closer to the real cost of running these models.
At that point you are beholden to your shareholders and no longer can eschew profit in favor of ethics.
Unfortunately, I think this is the beginning of the end of Anthropic and Modei being a company and CEO you could actually get behind and believe that they were trying to do "the right thing".
It will become an increasingly more cutthroat competition between Anthropic and OpenAI (and perhaps Google eventually if they can close the gap between their frontier models and Claude/GPT) to win market share and revenue.
Perhaps Amodei will eventually leave Anthropic too and start yet another AI startup because of Anthropic's seemingly inevitable prioritization of profit over safety.
Just how if Boeing was able to release a supersonic plane that was also twice as efficient tomorrow; it'd destroy any airline that was deep in debt for its current "now worthless" planes.
A publicly traded company is legally obligated to go against the global good.
Call me an optimist, but I'm still holding out hope that Amodei is and still can do the right thing. That hope is fading fast though.
So no matter what, if you do something lots of people like (and hence compensate you for), you will be evil.
It's a very interesting quirk of human intuition.
Can't blame someone who comes to such a conclusion about money and power.
Yet here they are, often considered on of the most evil companies on Earth. That's the interesting quirk.
Can you explain what you mean by this? I disagree but I don't understand how you think Google did this so I am very curious.
For my part, I started using the internet before Google, and I strongly hold the opinion that Google's greatest contribution to the internet was utterly destroying its peer to peer, free, open exchange model by being the largest proponent of centralizing and corporatizing the web.
I was about to call it reselling but so many startups with their fingers in the tech startup pie offer containerised cloud compute akin to a loss leader. Harking back to the old days of buying clock time on a mainframe except you're getting it for free for a while.
Like, Apple computers are already quite pricey -- $1000 or $2000 or so for a decent one. But you can spec up one that’s a bit better (not really that much better) and they’ll charge you $10K, $20K, $30K. Some customers want that and many are willing to pay for it.
Is there an equivalent ultra-high-end LLM you can have if you’re willing to pay? Or does it not exist because it would cost too much to train?
I guess at the time that was GPT-4.5. I don't think people used it a lot because it was crazy expensive, and not that much better than the rest of the crop.
I'd rather be surprised if they are still doing business by then.
I’m guessing we’re gonna have a world like working on cars - most people won’t have expensive tools (ex a full hydraulic lift) for personal stuff, they are gonna have to make do with lesser tools.
i bought a $3k AMD395+ under the Sam Altman price hike and its got a local model that readily accomplishes medial tasks.
theres a ceiling to these price hikes because open weights will keep popping up as competitors tey to advertise their wares.
sure, we POV different capabilities but theres definitely not that much cash in propfietary models for their indererminance
Or they are just not willing to burn obscene levels of capital like OpenAI.
It is like comparing an 8K display to a 16K display because at normal viewing distance, the difference is imperceptible, but 16K comes at significant premium.
The same applies to intelligence. Sure, some users might register a meaningful bump, but if 99% can't tell the difference in their day-to-day work, does it matter?
A 20-30% cost increase needs to deliver a proportional leap in perceivable value.
This is also why I don't see the models getting commoditized anytime soon - the dimensionality of LLM output that is economically relevant keeps growing linearly for coding (therefore the possibility space of LLM outputs grows exponentially) which keeps the frontier nontrivial and thus not commoditized.
In contrast, there is not much demand for 100 page articles written by LLMs in response to basic conversational questions, therefore the models are basically commoditized at answering conversational questions because they have already saturated the difficulty/usefulness curve.
Doubt. Yes. there was at one point it suddenly became useful to write code in a general sense. I have seen almost no improvement in department of architecting, operations and gaslighting. In fact gaslighting has gotten worse. Entire output based on wrong assumption that it hid, almost intentionally. And I had to create very dedicated, non-agentic tools to combat this.
And all of this with latest Opus line.
Lately I've been wondering too just how large these proprietary "ultra powerful frontier models" really are. It wouldn't shock me if the default models aren't actually just some kind of crazy MoE thing with only a very small number of active params but a huge pool of experts to draw from for world knowledge.
I am getting 10tok/sec on a 27B of Qwen3.5 (thinking, Q4, 18GB) on an M4/32GB Mac Mini. It’s slow.
For a 9B (much smaller, non-thinking) I am getting 30tok/sec, which is fast enough for regular use if you need something from the training data (like how to use grep or Hemingways favorite cocktail).
I’m using LMStudio, which is very easy and free (beer).
If I can get the performance I'm seeing out of free models on a 6-year-old Macbook Pro M1, it's a sign of things to come.
Frontier models will have their place for 1) extensive integrations and tooling and 2) massive context windows. But I could see a very real local-first near future where a good portion of compute and inference is run locally and only goes to a frontier model as needed.
If Claude understood what you mean better without you having to over explain it would be an improvement
For coding though, there is kind of no limit to the complexity of software. The more invariants and potential interactions the model can be aware of, the better presumably. It can handle larger codebases. Probably past the point where humans could work on said codebases unassisted (which brings other potential problems).
For summarizing creative writing, I've found Opus and Gemini 3 pro are still only okay and actively bad once it gets over 15K tokens or so.
A lot of long context and attention improvements have been focused on Needle in a Haystack type scenarios, which is the opposite of what summarization needs.
You raised a good point, what's a good metric for LLM performance? There's surely all the benchmarks out there, but aren't they one and done? Usually at release? What keeps checking the performance of those models. At this point it's just by feel. People say models have been dumbed down, and that's it.
I think the actual future is open source models. Problem is, they don't have the huge marketing budget Anthropic or OpenAI does.
It doesn't matter if a model is e.g. 30% cheaper to use than another (token-wise) but I need to burn 2x more tokens to get the same acceptable result.
It's not necessary a single discrete point I think. In my experience, it's tied to the quality/power of your harness and tooling. More powerful tooling has made revealed differences between models that were previously not easy to notice. This matches your display analogy, because I'm essentially saying that the point at which display resolution improvements are imperceptible matters on how far you sit.
I was always wondering where that breaking point for cost/peformance is for displays. I use 4K 27” and it’s noticeably much better for text than 1440p@27 but no idea if the next/ and final stop is 6k or 8k?
I switched to the Studio Display XDR and it is noticeably better than my 4k displays and my 1440p displays feel positively ancient and near unusable for text.
You mean a couple of years ago?
https://docs.github.com/fr/copilot/reference/ai-models/suppo...
At 7.5x for 4.7, heck no. It isn't even clear it is an upgrade over Opus 4.6.
Opus 4.5 and 4.6 will be removed very soon.
So what is your contingency plan?
> Over the coming weeks, Opus 4.7 will replace Opus 4.5 and Opus 4.6 in the model picker for Copilot Pro+.
> This model is launching with a 7.5× premium request multiplier as part of promotional pricing until April 30th
TBF, it's a rumour that they are switching to per-token price in May, but it's from an insider (apparently), and seeing how good of a deal the current per-request pricing is, everyone expects them to bump prices sometime soon or switch to per-token pricing.
It's a very good model for a very good price
When pushed it did the 'ol "whoopsie, silly me"; turned out the hallucination had been flagged by the agent and ignored by Opus.
Makes it hard to trust it, which sucks as it's a heavy part of my workflow.
The key question is how well it a given model does the work, which is a lot harder to measure. But I think token costs are still an order of magnitude below the point where a US-based developer using AI for coding should be asking questions about price; at current price points, the cost/benefit question is dominated by what makes the best use of your limited time as an engineer.
The final calculation assumes that Opus 4.7 uses the exact same trajectory + reasoning output as Opus 4.6. I have not verified, but I assume it not to be the case, given that Opus 4.7 on Low thinking is strictly better than Opus 4.6 on Medium, etc., etc.
https://www.stet.sh/blog/opus-4-7-zod
Progress. /s
> Progress. /s
pretty much, lmao. my theory is 4.6 started thinking less to save compute for 4.7 release. but who knows what's going on at anthropic
People at Anthropic, of course
https://www.anthropic.com/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww-...
"given that Opus 4.7 on Low thinking is strictly better than Opus 4.6 on Medium, etc., etc.”
Opus 4.7 in general is more expensive for similar usage. Now we can argue that is provides better performance all else being equal but I haven’t been able to see that
1. In my own use, since 1 Apr this month, very heavy coding:
> 472.8K Input Tokens +299.3M cached > 2.2M Output Tokens
My workloads generate ~5x more output than input, and output tokens cost 5x more per token... output dominates my bill at roughly 25x the cost of input. (Even more so when you consider cache hits!) If Opus 4.7 was more efficient with reasoning (and thus output), I'd likely save considerable money (were I paying per-token).
2. Anthropic's benchmarks DO show strictly-better (granted they are Anthropic's benchmarks, so salt may be needed) https://www.anthropic.com/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww-...
Human psychology is surprisingly similar, and same pattern comes across domains.
I didn't buy Springles chips in years, even the box now is nothing like it was. Thinner. Shorter. I imagine how far from the top the slices stack up.
I think a big issue with the industry right now is it's constantly chasing higher performing models and that comes at the cost of everything else. What I would love to see in the next few years is all these frontier AI labs go from just trying to create the most powerful model at any cost to actually making the whole thing sustainable and focusing on efficiency.
The GPT-3 era was a taste of what the future could hold but those models were toys compare to what we have today. We saw real gains during the GPT-4 / Claude 3 era where they could start being used as tools but required quite a bit of oversight. Now in the GPT-5 / Claude 4 era I don't really think we need to go much further and start focusing on efficiency and sustainability.
What I would love the industry to start focusing on in the next few years is not on the high end but the low end. Focus on making the 0.5B - 1B parameter models better for specific tasks. I'm currently experimenting with fine-tuning 0.5B models for very specific tasks and long term I think that's the future of AI.
If you can forgive the obviously-AI-generated writing, [CPUs Aren't Dead](https://seqpu.com/CPUsArentDead) makes an interesting point on AI progress: Google's latest, smallest Gemma model (Gemma 4 E2B), which can run on a cell phone, outperforms GPT-3.5-turbo. Granted, this factoid is based on `MT-Bench` performance, a benchmark from 2023 which I assume to be both fully saturated and leaked into the training data for modern LLMs. However, cross-referencing [Artificial Analysis' Intelligence Index](https://artificialanalysis.ai/models?models=gemma-4-e2b-non-...) suggests that indeed the latest 2B open-weights models are capable of matching or beating 175B models from 3-4 years ago. Perhaps more impressive, [Gemma 4 E4B matches or beats GPT-4o](https://artificialanalysis.ai/models?models=gemma-4-e4b%2Cge...) on many benchmarks.
If this trend continues, perhaps we'll have the capabilities of today's best models available to reasonably run on our laptops!
I personally think the whole "the newest model is crazy! You've gotta use X (insert most expensive model)" Is just FOMO and marketing-prone people just parroting whatever they've seen in the news or online.
I'm not seeing that in my testing, but these opinions are all vibe based anyway.
> max: Max effort can deliver performance gains in some use cases, but may show diminishing returns from increased token usage. This setting can also sometimes be prone to overthinking. We recommend testing max effort for intelligence-demanding tasks.
> xhigh (new): Extra high effort is the best setting for most coding and agentic use cases
Ref: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/prompt...
I'm already at 27% of my weekly limit in ONE DAY.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47799256
it seems to hallucinate a bit more (anecdotal)
Brilliant.
Ouch, that's very different than experience. What effort level? Are you careful to avoid pushing session context use beyond 350k or so (assuming 1m context)?
And this particular set of things has context routinely hit 350-450k before I compact.
That's likely what it is? I think this particular work stream is eating a lot of tokens.
Earlier this week (before Open 4.7 hit), I just turned off 1m context and had it grow a lot slower.
I also have it on high all the time. Medium was starting to feel like it was making the occasional bad decisions and also forgetting things more.
All of us doing crazy agentic stuff were fine on max before this. Now with Opus 4.7, we're no longer fine, and troubleshooting, and working through options.
Ya...you may be who I'm talking about though (if you're speaking from experience). If your methodology is "I used 4.6 max, so I'm going to try 4.7 max" this is fully on you - 4.7 max is not equivalent to 4.6 max, you want 4.7 xhigh.
From their docs:
max: Max effort can deliver performance gains in some use cases, but may show diminishing returns from increased token usage. This setting can also sometimes be prone to overthinking. We recommend testing max effort for intelligence-demanding tasks.
xhigh (new): Extra high effort is the best setting for most coding and agentic use cases.
I am on xhigh.
I've always used high, so maybe I should be using xhigh
I used up 1/3rd of my context in less than a day. I am working diligently to do whatever I can to lower token usage.
Recently it started promoting me for feedback even though I am on API access and have disabled this. When I did a deep dive of their feedback mechanism in the past (months ago so probably changed a lot since then) the feedback prompt was pushing message ids even if you didn't respond. If you are on API usage and have told them no to training on your data then anything pushing a message id implies that it is leaking information about your session. It is hard to keep auditing them when they push so many changes so I am now 'default they are stealing my info' instead of believing their privacy/data use policy claims. Basically, my level of trust is eroding fast in their commitment to not training on me and I am paying a premium to not have that happen.
Given that Opus 4.6 and even Sonnet 4.6 are still valid options, for me the question is not "Does 4.7 cost more than claimed?" but "What capabilities does 4.7 give me that 4.6 did not?"
Yesterday 4.6 was a great option and it is too soon for me to tell if 4.7 is a meaningful lift. If it is, then I can evaluate if the increased cost is justified.
I'll look at the new models, but increasing the token consumptions by a factor of 7 on copilot, and then running into all of these budget management topics people talk about? That seems to introduce even more flow-breakers into my workflow, and I don't think it'll be 7 times better. Maybe in some planning and architectural topics where I used Opus 4.6 before.
https://marginlab.ai/trackers/claude-code-historical-perform...
But... Are you really going to completely rely on benchmarks that have time and time again be shown to be gamed as the complete story?
My take: It is pretty clear that the capacity crunch is real and the changes they made to effort are in part to reduce that. It likely changed the experience for users.
Moreover, on the companion codex graphs (https://marginlab.ai/trackers/codex-historical-performance/), you can see a few different GPT model releases marked yet none correspond to a visual break in the series. Either GPT 5.4-xhigh is no more powerful than GPT 5.2, or the benchmarking apparatus is not sensitive enough to detect such changes.
https://matrix.dev/blog-2026-04-16.html (We were talking to Opus 4.7 twelve days ago)
Looks like they lost the mandate of heaven, if Open AI plays it right it might be their end. Add to that the open source models from China.
When I read these comments on Hacker News, I see a lot of people miffed about their personal subscription limits. I think this is a viewpoint that is very consumer focused, and probably within Anthropic they're seeing buckets of money being dumped on them from enterprises. They probably don't really care as much about the individual subscription user, especially power users.
2. Anthropic and OpenAI's financials are totally different. The former has nearly the same RRR and a fraction of the cash burn. There is a reason Anthropic is hot on secondary and OAI isn't
This is not so much about my instructions being followed more closely. It's the LLM being smarter about what's going on and for example saving me time on unnecessary expeditions. This is where models have been most notably been getting better to my experience. Understanding the bigger picture. Applying taste.
It's harder to measure, of course, but, at least for my coding needs, there is still a lot of room here.
If one session costs an additional 20% that's completely fine, if that session gets me 20% closer to a finished product (or: not 20% further away). Even 10% closer would probably still be entirely fine, given how cheap it is.
People that think they got what they wanted, the feature is there!, so they can't complain but...
People that end up essentially randomly picking so the average value of the choices made by customers is suboptimal.
You're offended by their political beliefs, so you don't like the way the model works?
I also wonder if token utilization has or will ever find its way to employee performance reviews as these models go up in price.
[0] https://she-llac.com/claude-limits
[1] https://xcancel.com/bcherny/status/2044839936235553167
And then it proceeded to rewrite the block with a dict lookup plus if-elses, instead of using match/case. I had to nag it to actually rewrite the code the way it said it would!
I am finding that for complex tasks, Claude's quality of output varies _tremendously_ with repeated runs of the same model and prompt. For example, last week I wrote up (with my own brain and keyboard) a somewhat detailed plain english spec of a work-related productivity app that I've always wanted but never had the time to write. It was roughly the length of an average college essay. The first thing I asked Claude to do was not write any code, but come up with a more formal design and implementation plan based on the requirements that I gave. The idea was to then hand _that_ to Claude and say, okay, now build it.
I used Opus 4.6 with High reasoning for all of this and did not change any model settings between runs.
The first run was overall _amazing_. It was detailed, well-written, contained everything that I asked for. The only drawback was that I was ambiguous on a couple of points which meant that the model went off and designed something in a way that I wasn't expecting and didn't intend. So I cleared that up in my prompt, and instead of keeping the context and building on what was already there, I started a new chat and had it start again from scratch.
What it wrote the second time was _far_ less impressive. The writing was terse, there was a lot less detail, the pretty dependency charts and various tables it made the first time were all gone. Lots of stuff was underspecified or outright missing.
New chat, start again. Similar results as the second run, maybe a bit worse. It also started _writing code_ which was something I told it NOT to do. At this point I'm starting to panic a little because I'm sure I didn't add, "oh, and make it crappy" to the prompt and I was a little angry about not saving the first iteration since it was fairly close to what I had wanted anyway.
I decided to try one last time and it finally gave me back something within about 95% of the first run in terms of quality, but with all the problems fixed. So, I was (finally) happy with that, and it used that to generate the application surprisingly well, with only a few issues that should not be too hard to fix after the fact.
So I guess 4th time was a charm, and the fare was about $7 in tokens to get there.
So far it costs a lot less, because I'm not going to be using it.
This was what I thought was my best moat as a senior dev. No other model has been able to come close to the throughput I could achieve on my own before. Might be a fluke of course, and they've picked up a few patterns in training that applies to this particular problem and doesn't generalize. We'll see.
Except, it's not that trivial to solve. I tried experimenting with asking the model to first give a list of symbols it will modify, and then just write the modified symbols. The results were OK, but less refined than when it echoes back the entire file.
The way I see it is that when you echo back the entire file, the process of thinking "should I do an edit here" is distributed over a longer span, so it has more room to make a good decision. Like instead of asking "which 2 of the 10 functions should you change" you're asking it "should you change method1? what about method2? what about method3?", etc., and that puts less pressure on the LLM.
Except, currently we are effectively paying for the LLM to make that decision for *every token*, which is terribly inefficient. So, there has to be some middle ground between expensively echoing back thousands of unchanged tokens and giving an error-ridden high-level summary. We just haven't found that middle ground yet.
grit.io was working on this years ago, not sure if they are still alive/around, but I liked their approach (just had a very buggy transformer/language).
I thought coding harnesses provided tools to apply diffs so the LLM didn't have to echo back the entire file?
So, in practice, many tools still work on the file level.
4.6 performers worse or the same in most of the tasks I have. If there is a parameter that made me use 4.6 more frequently is because 4.5 get dumber and not because 4.6 seemed smarter.
And if it's not good enough for coding, what kind of money, if any, would make it good enough?
Do yourself a favor: Set up OpenCode and OpenRouter, and try all the models you want to try there.
Other than the top performers (e.g. GLM 5.1, Kimi K2.5, where required hardware is basically unaffordable for a single person), the open models are more trouble than they're worth IMO, at least for now (in terms of actually Getting Shit Done).
Open models are not bullshit, they work fine for many cases and newer techniques like SSD offload make even 500B+ models accessible for simple uses (NOT real-time agentic coding!) on very limited hardware. Of course if you want the full-featured experience it's going to cost a lot.
People that love open models dramatically overstate how good the benchmaxxed open models are. They are nowhere near Opus.
I took the plan that I used from Codex and handed it to opencode with Qwen 3.5 running locally.
It created a library very similar to Codex but took 2x longer.
I haven't tried Qwen 3.6 but I hear it's another improvement. I'm confident with my AI skills that if/when cheap/subsidized models go away, I'll be fine running locally.
Fun fact: AWS offers apple silicon EC2 instances you can spin up to test.
Many providers out there host open weights models for cheap, try them out and see what you think before actually investing in hardware to run your own.
The best bang for the buck now is subcribing to token plans from Z.ai (GLM 5.1), MiniMax (MiniMax M2.7) or ALibaba Cloud (Qwen 3.6 Plus)
Running quantized models won't give you results comparable to Opus or GPT.
> In Claude Code, we’ve raised the default effort level to xhigh for all plans.
Try changing your effort level and see what results you get
I find 5 thinking levels to be super confusing - I dont really get why they went from 3 -> 5
So yes, for the same tasks, usage runs out faster (currently)
And now maintaining that pace means absorbing arbitrary price increases, shrugged off with “we were operating at a loss anyway.”
It stops being “pay to play” and starts looking more like pay just to stay in the ring, while enterprise players barely feel the hit and everyone else gets squeezed out.
Market maturing my butthole... it’s obviously a dependency being priced in real time. Tech is an utter shit show right now, compounded by the disaster of the unemployment market still reeling from the overhiring of 2020.
save up now and career pivot. pick up gardening.
"Utility" is close, but "energy source" may be closer. When it becomes the thing powering the pace of work itself, raising prices is less about charging for access and more about taxing dependency.
In this context I also imagine we will have greater and greater local models, and the (dependency) ending game is completely unclear.
Commercial inference providers serve Chinese models of comparable quality at 0.1x-0.25x. I think Anthropic realised that the game is up and they will not be able to hold the lead in quality forever so it's best to switch to value extraction whilst that lead is still somewhat there.
"Comparable" is doing some heavy lifting there. Comparable to Anthropic models in 1H'25, maybe.
But let's say for the sake of discussion Opus is much better - still doesn't justify the price disparity especially when considering that other models are provided by commercial inference providers and anthropics is inhouse.
The problem here is people think AI benchmarks are analogous to say, CPU performance benchmarks. They're not:
* You can't control all the variables, only one (the prompt).
* The outputs, BY DESIGN, can fluctuate wildly for no apparent reason (i.e., first run, utter failure, second run, success).
* The biggest point, once a benchmark is known, future iterations of the model will be trained on it.
Trying to objectively measure model performance is a fool's errand.
Why release this?
This is already becoming apparent as users are seeing quality degrade which implies that anthropic is dropping performance across the board to minimize financial losses.
Feels like LLMs are devolving into having a single, instantly recognizable and predictable writing style.
Re-ran the bake-off with 4.7 authoring and… gpt5.4 still clearly winning. Same skills, same prompts, same agents.md.
But it looks like it's just creeping up. Probably because we're paying for construction, not just inference right now.
https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/pricing
So if you are generating more tokens, you are eating up your usage faster
People love to throw around "this is the dumbest AI will ever be", but the corollary to that is "this is the most aligned the incentives between model providers and customers will ever be" because we're all just burning VC money for now.
That's one market segment - the high priced one, but not necessarily the most profitable one. Ferrari's 2025 income was $2B while Toyota's was $30B.
Maybe a more apt comparison is Sun Microsystems vs the PC Clone market. Sun could get away with high prices until the PC Clones became so fast (coupled with the rise of Linux) that they ate Sun's market and Sun went out of business.
There may be a market for niche expensive LLMs specialized for certain markets, but I'll be amazed if the mass coding market doesn't become a commodity one with the winners being the low cost providers, either in terms of API/subscriptions costs, or licensing models for companies to run on their own (on-prem or cloud) servers.
Please say this louder for everyone to hear. We are still at the stage where it is best for Anthropic's product to be as consumer aligned (and cost-friendly) as possible. Anthropic is loosing a lot of money. Both of those things will not be true in the near future.
Gamblers (vibe-coders) at Anthropic's casino realising that their new slot machine upgrade (Claude Opus) is now taking 20%-30% more credits for every push of the spin button.
Problem is, it advertises how good it is (unverified benchmarks) and has a better random number generator but it still can be rigged (made dumber) by the vendor (Anthropic).
The house (Anthropic) always wins.
> People just want free tools forever?
Using local models are the answer to this if you want to use AI models free forever.
1. https://github.com/juliusbrussee/caveman
Much of the token usage is in reasoning, exploring, and code generation rather than outputs to the user.
Does making Claude sound like a caveman actually move the needle on costs? I am not sure anymore whether people are serious about this.
To me, caveman sounds bad and is not as easy to understand compared to normal English.