[HN Gopher] Qwen3.8 Max now ranked as the best overall model by ...
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       Qwen3.8 Max now ranked as the best overall model by agentic index
        
       Author : apitman
       Score  : 504 points
       Date   : 2026-08-06 18:44 UTC (16 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (artificialanalysis.ai)
 (TXT) w3m dump (artificialanalysis.ai)
        
       | embedding-shape wrote:
       | Strange that the page
       | https://artificialanalysis.ai/agents/coding-agents doesn't even
       | mention "Qwen" once if it's now the "best" according to one of
       | their one index?
        
         | scrlk wrote:
         | Different benchmarks:
         | 
         | > Artificial Analysis Agentic Index: Represents the weighted
         | average of agentic capabilities benchmarks in the Artificial
         | Analysis Intelligence Index (GDPval-AA v2, Tau3-Banking)
         | 
         | > Artificial Analysis Coding Agent Index v1.3 incorporates 3
         | benchmarks: DeepSWE, Terminal-Bench v2, and SWE-Atlas-QnA
         | 
         | Qwen3.8 Max is 55.4 on the Agentic Index but hasn't been tested
         | for the Coding Agent Index.
        
           | apitman wrote:
           | Looks like coding agent is model+harness. There are far fewer
           | models represented on that page. I believe "agentic index" is
           | still the metric to look at for coding performance. I could
           | be wrong about that though.
        
         | Bootvis wrote:
         | Indeed, and this Qwen 3.8 max specific page:
         | 
         | https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/qwen3-8-max
         | 
         | Doesn't have the claim either. Clickbait?
        
           | petu wrote:
           | This page has it, scroll to "Intelligence" header (not the
           | highlights one, but second on the page / with black square)
           | and click "Agentic Index"
        
             | Bootvis wrote:
             | So the original link should be: https://artificialanalysis.
             | ai/models/qwen3-8-max?intelligenc...
             | 
             | Even then, this seems a much more marginal win than the
             | headline suggested to me.
        
         | amelius wrote:
         | According to those graphs, Grok 4.5 appears to be the most
         | cost-effective model.
        
           | user43928 wrote:
           | $0.05 per task, Intelligence Index score 52 -> GPT 5.6 Luna
           | max
           | 
           | $0.36 per task, Intelligence Index score 56 -> Grok 4.5 high
           | 
           | $1.13 per task, Intelligence Index score 58 -> Qwen 3.8 Max
           | 
           | $0.81 per task, Intelligence Index score 59 -> GPT 5.6 Sol
           | xhigh
           | 
           | $1.80 per task, Intelligence Index score 63 -> Opus 5 xhigh
        
         | artemisart wrote:
         | They didn't run all benchmarks. It's the best in AA agentic
         | index (GDPval-AA v2, 3-Banking) but not coding index (DeepSWE
         | which is missing, Terminal-Bench v2.1 they have 81% vs 90% for
         | Sol, SWE-Atlas-QnA missing).
        
         | moritzwarhier wrote:
         | Does "artificial analysis" mean what it says? Dubious.
         | 
         | But: I've been very impressed by the larger Qwen Models, and a
         | brief try of Kimi also impressed me.
         | 
         | A lingering sense of quality degradation when going deep
         | remains.
         | 
         | But that's not an accusation: they seem to be hitting the
         | compute/quality tradeoff extremely well.
         | 
         | And on-prem capability is simply irreplaceable.
         | 
         | Apart from all the innovations that were driven by the strive
         | for this optimization: quantization, "distilling" (without
         | obvious mad-cows-disease)... I think China was an invaluable
         | player in this progress. Intuitively, I'd even go so far to
         | speculate that LLaMa wouldn't exist without the competition.
        
       | syntaxing wrote:
       | I am so excited for Qwen 3.8 27B. It's a shame how slow prefill
       | (~3-400) is on a strix halo but it's such a good model for
       | agentic tasks.
        
         | tarr11 wrote:
         | What type of agentic tasks are you using it for (eg how
         | complex)?
        
           | syntaxing wrote:
           | For personal stuff, I use it with AnythingLLM. It replaced
           | any Google search for me. For coding, I run opencode though I
           | have been debating switching to Pi. I would argue it's at
           | Sonnet 3 level.
        
         | CamperBob2 wrote:
         | How are you running it on a Strix Halo? The weights aren't out
         | yet, are they?
        
           | 13rac1 wrote:
           | I interpret @syntaxing as meaning they are looking forward to
           | running Qwen3.8-27B, but are frustrated by prefill times with
           | other models, such as Qwen3.6-27B.
        
           | syntaxing wrote:
           | I meant Qwen3.6. Unsloth supposedly has early preview of the
           | model and the VRAM requirement is the same so most people
           | expect similar model size and type.
        
         | LoganDark wrote:
         | I find that 35B-A3B is much easier to run on my M4 Max (both
         | prefill and generation)
        
           | markasoftware wrote:
           | It's well known 35b is much faster (on any hardware) and
           | quite a bit dumber
        
             | dofm wrote:
             | This really very much depends on how you are using it, I
             | think. If you intend to leave it to solve long context
             | problems and write whole prototypes, the 27B is going to be
             | much better.
             | 
             | But if you are sort of pair-programming with the model, the
             | speed obviously matters and I think then the 35B is
             | acceptably smart, and when it's wrong it'll be wrong much
             | more quickly. It seems very good on SQL and PHP, and I
             | assume on typical JS and Python.
             | 
             | I would rather work that way, so I hope they do produce a
             | small MoE model.
        
         | colingauvin wrote:
         | Prefill is survivable if you cache well. But what kills me is
         | the context. Qwen 27 needs a ton of room for KV Cache. I guess
         | not an issue on a 128 GB Halo or Spark, but if you are running
         | of consumer/prosumer GPUs it's miserable to be compacting every
         | 120k tokens.
        
       | drnick1 wrote:
       | Why does an open weights model cost nearly the same as GPT5.6?
       | $1.14 vs $1.23 on the cost index. Since you can't presumably run
       | this on your own hardware given the model size and hence gain
       | other things like privacy, I don't see any reason to move away
       | from GPT at this rate.
        
         | eli wrote:
         | It's not enough that it's better?
         | 
         | Many providers will host it and will compete on price. It also
         | can't easily be taken away because one company (or one
         | government) decides they don't want it around any more. People
         | can fine-tune it for particular workloads.
        
           | drnick1 wrote:
           | > It's not enough that it's better?
           | 
           | It's barely better, and barely cheaper, not really enough to
           | challenge the status quo IMO. Half the price for basically
           | the same performance would be a much stronger value
           | proposition.
        
             | ux266478 wrote:
             | What status quo? Just look at Openrouter's rankings:
             | https://openrouter.ai/rankings
             | 
             | Things change radically month to month. Nobody is remotely
             | close to capturing the market or having any kind of
             | stability over time. People move around quite a lot, often
             | to sidegrade within a generation. Just playing fly on the
             | wall with discourse would be enough to tell you all of
             | this, even without the data to back it up.
        
               | eli wrote:
               | That's got a significant selection bias. Claude and
               | ChatGPT and Gemini and other subs do not go through
               | openrouter.
        
               | ux266478 wrote:
               | Not really, because that's not a unique aspect of any of
               | those. It's true of all subscription services (that I'm
               | aware of), as well as all of the free models. The
               | selection bias primarily will be against models which be
               | an outlier in the difference between openrouter users and
               | total users, which is a much harder position to argue for
               | any given company except for maybe Twitter.
               | 
               | You can argue there's a selection bias that openrouter
               | users are less likely to display model loyalty, but it
               | would still be a visible confounding factor if it was a
               | statistically significant behavior. And it's not. Nor is
               | there a visibly meaningful indication that people don't
               | sidegrade between models. With every single data set,
               | you're going to see that. You're also going to see it
               | reflected in discourse, as I mentioned. Fact of the
               | matter is there isn't a status quo in AI any more than
               | there's a status quo in cars.
        
               | SwellJoe wrote:
               | If anybody has, it's DeepSeek. But, with the promised
               | price hikes, I'm sure that'll change. I'm guessing
               | they're raising prices not because they're not making a
               | profit at those prices, but because they're running into
               | capacity problems and need to slow down until they've got
               | more or risk providing poor service. For now DeepSeek
               | Flash is the best deal going for API usage and its
               | popularity makes sense.
               | 
               | Also, OpenRouter misses most of the usage of the US
               | models, as most people are getting those from the vendor
               | directly via subscriptions.
        
           | Art9681 wrote:
           | They cherrypicked benchmarks. The ONE weighed benchmark where
           | is beats Opus5 by 0.1 points is what was linked because
           | that's how propaganda works. The Agentic Index that includes
           | the full benchmark suite has it in 5th place.
           | 
           | Might as well use gpt-sol.
        
             | iAMkenough wrote:
             | The whole industry cherry picks benchmarks.
             | 
             | I stopped paying attention to self-published benchmarks
             | when Apple started using those non-sensical performance
             | graphs with "relative performance" as a vertical axis when
             | announcing a new chip.
        
         | apitman wrote:
         | For one thing, providers of open models can't arbitrarily
         | increase their prices without facing competition.
        
           | frereubu wrote:
           | But given the extremely low cost of switching, why wouldn't
           | you use the cheaper one if they're comparable?
        
             | apitman wrote:
             | As low as it is, switching between providers on OpenRouter
             | is still lower.
             | 
             | That said, it's a fair point. For me, it boils down to
             | things covered here: https://earendil.com/posts/session-
             | portability/
             | 
             | Things like obscured reasoning traces.
        
             | copperx wrote:
             | Speed and reliability.
        
         | Alpha3031 wrote:
         | You said it yourself, model size and hardware. Big models cost
         | more (good optimisation reduces things slightly, but they still
         | need the hardware).
        
         | efficax wrote:
         | it's a big honking trillion some parameters model. it's not
         | cheap to run
        
         | jjice wrote:
         | Qwen Max is their large model - over a trillion params. Similar
         | to Kimi K3 in size. Qwen 3.8 27B is going to be more accessible
         | to your own hardware. I'd say that Qwen Max is not approachable
         | for the majority of people and companies to self-host.
        
         | criley2 wrote:
         | GPT5.6Sol completes the suite in 70M tokens, while Qwen3.8Max
         | needs like 145M tokens. So this is a case where models like
         | Qwen 3.8 and Kimi K3 use a lot more output (reasoning) tokens,
         | go a good bit slower, so they can ultimately achieve a better
         | intelligence score than if they went more quickly.
         | 
         | There are a couple of frontiers (ok bad word, maybe categories)
         | in open weight models.
         | 
         | These Qwen 3.8 and Kimi K3 style models aren't trying to win on
         | price, they're trying to compete on intelligence and
         | capability.
         | 
         | Models like Deepseek V4 Flash (updated this week) are $0.03 a
         | task, or 50X cheaper than Qwen3.8/Kimi K3, and 100X cheaper
         | than Fable, while offering stunning intelligence. That's a
         | different frontier for competition, and perhaps one more
         | interesting for someone who wants to see them compete on cost.
        
         | ecocentrik wrote:
         | Why should open weights correlate with cost? Cost correlates
         | with the expense of running the model more than it does to the
         | expense of developing the model.
        
         | jazzyjackson wrote:
         | Running a large model on rented GPU is still meaningfully more
         | private than handing your chat logs over to FAGA
        
           | TheCycoONE wrote:
           | The acronym is new to me: Facebook, Anthropic, Google,
           | openAi?
        
         | benjiro29 wrote:
         | _Why does an open weights model cost nearly the same as GPT5.6?
         | $1.14 vs $1.23 on the cost index._
         | 
         | What cost the most in API. Input, Cached Input, or Output.
         | There you have your answer.
         | 
         | Unfortunately, we have moved so much of the actual intelligence
         | of models towards reasoning, what results in some models
         | getting good scores, but this is because they are dumping a
         | insane amount of reasoning tokens at the problem.
         | 
         | So a mid priced model, with heavy reasoning output, cost the
         | same as a expensive model, with medium reasoning output.
         | 
         | Before the GPT Luna price drop of 80%, you actually had the
         | same price if you used Luna High and Sol Low. With the
         | difference that Sol Low was insane fast, and often way better
         | code.
         | 
         | https://deepswe.datacurve.ai/
         | 
         | Do not look at the top score but more what is on the horizontal
         | axis as you go down. Sol Medium is frankly, was the best
         | performance for dollar, until that Luna price drop. I will even
         | argue that despite the higher price, Sol Medium is still way
         | better despite Luna Max being cheaper. Or Opus Low, one of the
         | better values also.
         | 
         | What do you notice? Is that those models all have a high
         | intelligence start point for their low setting. So that means
         | they do not rely as much on output tokens aka thinking.
        
       | eli wrote:
       | I believe it. It's extremely good at troubleshooting. I gave Qwen
       | and Kimi K3 the same annoying, complicated, intermittent bug to
       | track down. Kimi did a bit better in understanding the existing
       | code, but Qwen built some diagnostic tools and did an excellent
       | statistical analysis on the log data. Qwen got way closer to the
       | truth.
       | 
       | I'm very much looking forward to their forthcoming smaller model
       | Qwen 3.8 releases. A version that can easily run locally would be
       | great.
        
         | comboy wrote:
         | How CLI are you guys using for qwen and kimi?
        
           | eli wrote:
           | I use https://pi.dev/ which works fine out of the box but is
           | fairly minimal and intended to be customized. There are many
           | extensions.
           | 
           | OpenCode or oh-my-pi might make more sense if you just want a
           | batteries-included agent. You can also make Claude Code work
           | with other models without too much work, but I think that's
           | asking for headaches.
        
             | trey-jones wrote:
             | I used claude with GLM and it's easy to set up, just hard
             | to find the documentation. No headaches really, unless you
             | want to use it against multiple different APIs.
        
             | Gooblebrai wrote:
             | Is there any subscription of any kind for Qwen? Or via
             | Pi.dev needs to be used with API credits?
        
               | iAMkenough wrote:
               | My first web search turned up this as the top result
               | https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/model-studio/coding-
               | pla...
        
               | adamgoodapp wrote:
               | Currently only these models are available: qwen3.7-plus
               | (vision), qwen3.6-plus (vision), kimi-k2.5 (vision),
               | glm-5, and MiniMax-M2.5
        
               | lkt wrote:
               | Opencode Go has Qwen 3.8 Max at $10/month
        
               | Gooblebrai wrote:
               | Found the usage limits on OpenCode Go quite poor tbh
        
           | g58892881 wrote:
           | pi
        
           | bitexploder wrote:
           | OpenRouter and Pi here now.
        
           | MrDrMcCoy wrote:
           | Hermes. It can be set up to delegate to OpenCode for better
           | multitasking and context usage as well.
        
         | thefourthchime wrote:
         | Did you also try Opus 5 and 5.6 Sol?
        
           | ghosty141 wrote:
           | 5.6 sol was very impressive for me. I had a weird behavior
           | while using Qt and I gave it a screenshot and my expectation
           | of what should happen and it read the Qt sourcode and showed
           | me that my issue was a bug (including link to the ticket).
        
           | sscaryterry wrote:
           | Opus 5 is just terrible
        
       | delduca wrote:
       | Go China!
        
       | SwellJoe wrote:
       | I find that surprising.
       | 
       | I've been trying it on several projects and have found it's
       | pretty sloppy. It leaves stuff broken, doesn't reliably write
       | tests to check its own work unless explicitly prompted,
       | misunderstands the assignment, etc.
       | 
       | It is smart and reasonably quick but not reliable.
        
         | dyauspitr wrote:
         | It's because they're doing some sort of combined score of
         | intelligence, speed and cost. On pure intelligence it doesn't
         | even show up in the top 10.
        
         | superfrank wrote:
         | I've come to the same conclusion over and over with all of the
         | Chinese models that have been claimed to be catching up with
         | OpenAI's and Anthropic's frontier models (Deepseek 4, GLM 5.2,
         | Kimi K3).
         | 
         | At their best, I think they're closing in on Opus and GPT, but
         | they're incredibly inconsistent and the variance in output
         | quality is much higher than the best from any of the Anthropic
         | or OpenAI models from the last few generations. The only way I
         | can describe it is that it feels like a lack of intuition with
         | the models which means I find my self needing to write longer
         | prompts or have more back and forth to get them to do what I
         | want from them.
         | 
         | To give an example, I have a saved prompt that I use as a
         | sanity check on some data I'm storing. It reads about 50 rows
         | from a DB and matches them to the UI and makes sure the data is
         | displaying correctly. I've been using this with GPT 5.5 and now
         | 5.6 for a few months and running it a few times a week with no
         | issue. Sometimes I'll run it multiple times in a single chat if
         | I notice bad data (run it, fix thing, run again, fix another
         | thing).
         | 
         | I recently tried to switch to using Deepseek v4 (first flash
         | and then pro) and while both did the task just fine, both would
         | do things like change the response format from one message to
         | another in the same chat or randomly decide to omit things it
         | didn't think were relevant. At one point I ran the prompt,
         | fixed some bad data, and then said "Okay, I fixed row 7, run
         | {prompt} again" and so it decided to leave row 7 out of the
         | response. A few times the first message would contain a table
         | and then the next run in the same chat would contain the data
         | in a bulleted list.
         | 
         | None of those are major issues and all could be solved with a
         | bit more rigor in my prompting, but for me it makes them harder
         | to work with. Those examples are a bit trivial, I think they're
         | the easiest way for me to illustrate the gaps I see with them.
        
       | aliljet wrote:
       | Is there a path to distill this model to do very specific things?
       | Like a RAG strategy for a small (or even large) corpus?
        
         | Alpha3031 wrote:
         | Depends on what you want to do. Some task specific models can
         | be trained with a few ten or hundred thousand training examples
         | so you can use a bigger model to produce synthetic training
         | examples and then fine tune a smaller student model. I think
         | that's the usual process. Whether you'd get acceptable
         | performance this way depends, as mentioned, on what you're
         | trying to do and what you'd consider acceptable.
        
         | teravor wrote:
         | once you are able to get the full probability distributions per
         | token you can distill it on specific domains. distilling
         | without that isn't generally a good idea unless you have
         | invested millions in the requisite infrastructure.
        
       | brcmthrowaway wrote:
       | Could someone like Apple be playing the long game - Good
       | Enough(tm) intelligence will eventually fit in our pocket and
       | homes?
        
         | LPisGood wrote:
         | Almost surely. Apple is extremely well positioned to take
         | advantage of this over the next decade.
        
         | colingauvin wrote:
         | DS4 Flash Q2/Q4 mixed quant fits on a DGX Spark (a $4000 device
         | which is not particularly unheard of expense for Apple
         | customers), and is indistinguishable for me from Opus for my
         | personal daily use/assistant benchmarks[0].
         | 
         | [0]https://humanparadox.org/local-vs-frontier-benchmarks-for-
         | my... - note here I tested Q8 but have found no difference at
         | lower quant.
        
           | dofm wrote:
           | Indeed. I like using Macs mostly, and the bargain M1 Max MBP
           | I am using for local LLMs is a fabulous experimentation
           | platform and does loads of other stuff well, so I am in no
           | rush, but if I reached the point of buying dedicated hardware
           | for an LLM, I'd be looking at the DGX Spark machines.
        
         | kyxsc wrote:
         | Apple is already doing this... they worked with Gemini to
         | distill the model into a smaller one that fits on your phone.
         | If you have iOS 27 Beta, you're already using this
        
           | notatoad wrote:
           | sort of. they have a local model, it does some things. they
           | also have significant cloud infrastructure backing it, and
           | most tasks are going to be sent off to the cloud for
           | processing, not be handled by the on-device model. Siri is
           | not on-device by any stretch of the imagination.
        
       | sirbor wrote:
       | Qwen is the way to go
        
       | dyauspitr wrote:
       | It doesn't even show up in the raw intelligence index, so how
       | could it possibly be the best?
        
       | quirino wrote:
       | A couple days ago they had published an overall score of 53 for
       | this model, but that was removed and today it returned with a
       | score of 56.
       | 
       | I wasn't able to find an explanation from them. Anyone knows what
       | happened?
        
         | Art9681 wrote:
         | A wire transfer happened.
        
           | ignoramous wrote:
           | The kind of distillation guaranteed to work.
        
       | steve-atx-7600 wrote:
       | curious about methodology. ive seen them post results for
       | claude/codex when they only ran over benchmarks 3 times per
       | model...
        
       | onomojo wrote:
       | Any benchmark showing Opus 5 as the best just loses credibility
       | for me. Anyone who's actually used Opus 5 daily knows what I'm
       | talking about.
        
         | copperx wrote:
         | I'm dumbfounded to see Opus 5 making SO MANY mistakes in coding
         | simple stuff. Most times, Fable 5 comes out to be cheaper
         | because it nails so many things much quicker than Opus 5.
        
           | garciasn wrote:
           | I have Fable plan and Opus implement. I haven't had any major
           | issues working this way; however, Opus does seem plain
           | fucking stupid compared to what I experienced with Sonnet
           | previously.
        
             | aenis wrote:
             | I do the same, and generally have good results, but it does
             | stupid things with gusto.
             | 
             | I'd open a blog with "weird things Opus did". Today it
             | launched a swarm of cpu-hogging processes to test if the
             | widget showing machine and I/O load is rendering nicely and
             | correctly. The test went fine, but it was no longer able to
             | kill those processes since they were really effectively
             | hogging the CPU _in various ways_ - being diligent, some of
             | them were hogging CPU, some were murdering the SSD, some
             | were pounding on the network adapters. Took me 30 mins to
             | recover the machine to a working state without killing the
             | meaningful, messy, in-flight sessions i had going on on
             | other projects.
        
             | petesergeant wrote:
             | > however, Opus does seem plain fucking stupid
             | 
             | Infuriatingly so, in a way I don't remember Opus 4.8 being,
             | but maybe I've just been ruined by Fable 5.
        
               | hbn wrote:
               | I bought my first LLM subscription with Claude right
               | before they gave access to Fable 5.
               | 
               | I got so used to it, when they finally pulled access for
               | me and I had to go back to Opus I felt like I was working
               | with my hands tied.
               | 
               | I finally know what those women with AI boyfriends felt
               | like when their app updated and it won't dirty talk with
               | them anymore.
        
               | moffkalast wrote:
               | Fable has spoiled us all.
        
               | sscaryterry wrote:
               | Not so sure, I'm sure Opus 5 is just shit.
        
               | moffkalast wrote:
               | Eh it's better than 4.8 in terms of what it can get done
               | on a good day, it's just far more taxing to get it there.
               | 
               | Like the Fable ban stunt, I wouldn't put it pass
               | Anthropic to kneecap Opus deliberately to drive more
               | people to their more expensive option.
        
           | usef- wrote:
           | Weird how different people's experiences are. If it's making
           | _simple_ mistakes something must be wrong in your setup
           | /context I assume? It's been solid for me, beyond the usual
           | LLMisms that all models have. But I keep context pretty
           | minimal.
        
             | cromka wrote:
             | Statements like this typically come from working on the
             | same setup and context using different models. I actually
             | have that very experience now; I work on something
             | security-adjacent so Fable often drops out, at which point
             | Opus behaves like its lobotomized half-sibling. Pardon me
             | the language, but I can't find a better example to be
             | honest.
        
             | nimonian wrote:
             | Agreed. Opus 5 is doing just fine, slightly better than
             | 4.8. It's personality is insufferable, but I find myself
             | catching fewer problems at code review. It generally
             | understands my conventions and isn't so eager to accrue
             | tech debt.
        
             | efficax wrote:
             | Every model that comes out comes with a bunch of people
             | saying "this one is actually dumb they were smart before"
             | and I don't really get it. The models since Opus 4.5 have
             | all been basically the same to me. Sometimes they do the
             | wrong thing, so you have to steer and stop and correct
             | them. Leaving them to operate on their own in no-human-in-
             | the-loop harnesses often gets bad results. But if you
             | single thread it, and keep your work targeted (you have to
             | know what you want the thing to do!), clear your context,
             | the models will do what you ask pretty reliably.
        
               | PacificSpecific wrote:
               | Glad to see this comment as this has generally been my
               | experience as well. I'm really curious to see why it's so
               | infuriating for others. My best guess is I'm using it
               | more conservatively than most other users in this thread.
        
             | yeeeloit wrote:
             | At this stage in the game almost none of the comments or
             | articles on HN can be trusted, if you know what I mean...
        
           | TacticalCoder wrote:
           | > I'm dumbfounded to see Opus 5 making SO MANY mistakes in
           | coding simple stuff.
           | 
           | To me it's not so much the dumb mistakes (although there are
           | some of those) but the ultra-verbose, mega-inefficient
           | "solutions" to some problems / prompts.
           | 
           | Stuff that "works" if you're the kind of person that
           | considers slamming a semi-trailer at 200 mph into a door did,
           | technically, result in the door being somehow "open".
           | 
           | As it's supposed to be one of the most advanced model, I
           | can't help but wonder if the solutions are that
           | bad/verbose/inefficient because we're already in a loop of
           | models being trained on sloppy-pasta from previous models.
        
         | visarga wrote:
         | Sent to solve one task, came back with half of it solved and 2
         | more problems.
        
           | capnjazz wrote:
           | "One thing worth your attention", "Two things worth knowing",
           | "One thing to eyeball"
        
             | greenchair wrote:
             | This is driving me crazy. opus 4.8 did not do this to me
             | not (at least during pre-5.0 timeframe). Feels like the new
             | cycle is one step forward, two steps back.
        
             | FridgeSeal wrote:
             | And one of them is always something just completely out of
             | scope and the other is something obvious it missed.
             | 
             | "One thing worth your attention, if you were to detonate a
             | pipe bomb in your house, it would have a negative effect on
             | your living room".
        
             | ethin wrote:
             | I don't use Claude code, just Claude web, and I get this
             | all the time. Or (since I have it push me to actually
             | think) it will ask me some question in our back-and-forth,
             | and then right after it'll provide the answer. As a "hint".
             | Like come on
        
           | vunderba wrote:
           | What really enrages me is the amount of effort it puts into
           | justifying weaseling out of work. (THAT'S MY JOB!)
           | 
           | It will do everything it can to defer or push it off, to the
           | point where I've had to add multiple imperative directives to
           | the AGENTS file telling it, in no uncertain terms, not to
           | defer tasks under any circumstances.
        
             | cyanydeez wrote:
             | sounds like someone needs a local llm.
        
               | vunderba wrote:
               | Oh I do. Headless 128GB RAM machine serving llama.cpp
               | with a number of local models that I use on a daily
               | basis.
               | 
               | * Qwen3-VL picks up new images in a NAS, auto captions
               | and adds the text descriptions as a hidden EXIF layer
               | into the image, which is used for fast search and
               | organization in conjunction with a Qdrant vector
               | database.
               | 
               | * Gemma3:27b is used for personal translation work
               | (mostly English and Chinese).
               | 
               | * Some small 8b models (like llama3.1) for sentiment
               | analysis on text.
               | 
               | But haven't really tried using local LLMs in conjunction
               | with agentic harnesses yet.
        
               | cyanydeez wrote:
               | recommend opencode w/qwen 35B or 27B with MTP.
               | 
               | My secret sauce is to use LLAMAcpp's reasoning-budget and
               | reasoning-message that trigger cut off to overthinking
               | with a message that says to either us subagents or
               | compress the context. opencode's dynamic context pruning
               | plugin can get you pretty far into the stratosphere.
        
               | vunderba wrote:
               | > My secret sauce is to use LLAMAcpp's reasoning-budget
               | and reasoning-message that trigger cut off to
               | overthinking with a message that says to either us
               | subagents or compress the context
               | 
               | Thanks for the tip - I like this a lot. I remember having
               | to do a lot of tweaking to curtail Qwen QwQ-32b when it
               | would go down an endless psychotic recursive reasoning
               | loops as part of its _" chain of reasoning."_
        
               | smartbit wrote:
               | Any experience with Sleev as replacement of DCP?
               | 
               | See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48883538 25 days
               | ago
               | 
               | > _The Sleev (the project has been renamed to make a
               | startup) creator was shilling their project in the
               | OpenCode Discord. That person is very convinced they have
               | something that no one has ever built before. They focused
               | on token reduction without any real evals for capability
               | impacts.
               | 
               | I'm generally against this context pruning without
               | prompting or details. Sleev is very opaque about how it
               | works and definitely will bust your cache._
        
         | logicchains wrote:
         | "As you requested, I've finished task X. Honestly, task X
         | turned out to require task Y, which I haven't actually done.
         | Task Y is the next step if you'd like to continue along this
         | route."
        
           | pornel wrote:
           | This is the hard-won load-bearing quote.
        
             | dr_dshiv wrote:
             | Belt and braces all the way down
        
             | paradox460 wrote:
             | The shape of this problem is very heavy
        
           | vardalab wrote:
           | Yeah, I told it to save in its memory that I don't want to
           | have any more word salad!
        
         | cromka wrote:
         | Agreed, it's extremely frustrating. It's the only model that
         | actually makes me curse when talking to it, even knowing how
         | counterproductive it is.
        
           | moffkalast wrote:
           | I'd certainly rank it at the very top of the want to kill
           | yourself when using it benchmark. It outperforms everything
           | else on that leaderboard.
           | 
           | With weaker models you can sort of understand, they're trying
           | their best and failing, but this thing just channels its
           | immense inteligence into being as annoying as possible
           | instead. I know it can do what I'm asking it to do, but it
           | just finds a way to weasel out of it, or maybe just thinks
           | for 10 minutes instead, then fixes one thing and breaks four
           | additional ones.
        
             | msp26 wrote:
             | yep matches my experience completely
             | 
             | But even fable has the annoying tendency to invent new
             | jargon and produce an incomprehensible soup of text.
        
               | cromka wrote:
               | Is there any model that knows how to smooth an overly
               | literary text over? I find Opus and Fable constantly
               | decorate the documentation they write like a damn 19/20th
               | century writer. We're working with IT stuff yet it writes
               | like it's going to win some Pulitzer prize. It's that one
               | thing I don't get why they can't train them to do
               | properly: I have not encountered a model yet that sticks
               | to the _current_ language of the domain it 's tasked
               | with.
        
               | msp26 wrote:
               | Not sure how to fully fix this but I remember a session
               | last week where I got so fed up mid way though reading a
               | response that I used the following:
               | 
               | "give me this again without jargon invented this session
               | at high density
               | 
               | and with a couple (maybe more or less) simple useful
               | ascii diagrams underneath each design"
               | 
               | The context is that I was discussing an experimental new
               | idea for my video game review analysis product.
               | 
               | Designs 1,2, and 3 were horrible: the model even
               | suggested a rejection after the word soup so it would
               | have been pointless to waste my fleeting time on Earth
               | reading it.
               | 
               | Otherwise, I generally really enjoyed using fable for
               | bouncing ideas. It was an absolute joy to have this thing
               | provide useful criticism, analyse sample data, and create
               | prototypes so that I could elevate my understanding of
               | the problem without stepping down from a pure
               | intuition/design headspace.
               | 
               | But I don't consider the purely model written code usable
               | for a feature this important. I'll probably scrap it
               | entirely and start from scratch with newfound
               | understanding.
        
           | hungryhobbit wrote:
           | The cursing thing blows my mind. "User is upset? Let's make
           | decisions even faster (ie. more wrong) because clearly that's
           | what they want!"
           | 
           | It's a simple switch to make: cursing = try harder instead of
           | cursing = stop trying. Is it really impossible to train
           | Claude that way?
        
             | kloop wrote:
             | It's training data might have a ton of examples of people
             | hurrying and screwing more after being yelled at
        
           | cromka wrote:
           | Replying to myself, because I just bumped into these: https:/
           | /www.reddit.com/r/claude/comments/1vfvdgz/anthropic_l... http
           | s://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1vgpyni/my_opus_5...
           | 
           | Especially the second one seems exactly like my experience.
        
           | sscaryterry wrote:
           | I've ditched Anthropic completely because of it. It makes me
           | furious.
        
         | bontaq wrote:
         | It's an infuriating model
        
         | nomel wrote:
         | What's the clear best, that you see?
        
           | petesergeant wrote:
           | Fable 5
        
           | drschwabe wrote:
           | GPT 5.6 Sol
        
           | kachnuv_ocasek wrote:
           | GLM 5.2
        
           | dgellow wrote:
           | Hilarious to see only different responses
        
             | ofjcihen wrote:
             | Should have been "clear best and what do you do"
        
         | enraged_camel wrote:
         | It's my daily driver. I like it and find it noticeably better
         | than Opus 4.8.
         | 
         | After I started reading complaints about Opus 5, I gave Fable
         | the task of evaluating a bunch of code Opus 4.8 had written and
         | compare it to Opus 5's code. Fable ran a dynamic workflow and
         | the scores came back 15-20% higher for Opus 5's code in terms
         | of quality, correctness and readability/conciseness. I did not
         | tell Fable which Opus wrote which code, and I turned off memory
         | as well to ensure there was no pollution from that angle.
         | 
         | My only complaint is that Opus 5's prose is annoying as hell. I
         | wrote a custom skill for it for concise debriefs and it has
         | been working pretty well for me.
        
           | agopaul wrote:
           | > My only complaint is that Opus 5's prose is annoying as
           | hell. I wrote a custom skill for it for concise debriefs and
           | it has been working pretty well for me.
           | 
           | I'm doing the same right now, and I've found that asking for
           | "simple English" works most of the times, although not
           | always.
           | 
           | Did you find better wording that works consistently?
        
         | fellowniusmonk wrote:
         | I have some internal tests I use for areas where one particular
         | solution/paradigm is dominant but worse.
         | 
         | Opus 4.6 is the last model that's actually useful and can
         | "adjust" its perspective to use the newer & better solution.
         | 
         | Where Opus 4.8-5 has over fit training on worse/older but
         | "dominant" solutions it refuses to adjust.
         | 
         | Not only does this create an existential threat to adopting
         | progress but it also means that if you have a code base that
         | has rare but real world tradeoff the newest versions of Opus
         | 4.7, 4.8 and 5 are worse than useless and become a major dev
         | timesink.
        
         | Fordec wrote:
         | Yeah, I've dropped back to 4.8 entirely for the remainder of
         | this billing cycle. I'm going to be seriously looking into Qwen
         | adoption and harness migration options over the course of
         | August.
        
           | thomasfromcdnjs wrote:
           | Same.
           | 
           | I could not get Opus 5 to do anything without losing a few
           | years of my life from stress.
           | 
           | Fable has been okay but I am doing ML work and not allowed to
           | use it which feels insane.
        
         | cesarvarela wrote:
         | It is infuriating to interact with, but it is also first in
         | many blind test leaderboards on LLMArena
        
         | CuriouslyC wrote:
         | Ironically, Opus 5 is the most benchmaxxed model I've seen from
         | Anthropic. It is legitimately smart in a lot of ways but it has
         | communication issues, both in terms of how it communicates (all
         | the autism of GPT class models, without the brevity) and how
         | well it catches all the nuance of what you tell it.
        
         | sunaookami wrote:
         | Can not confirm, for me it's the complete opposite.
        
         | combyn8tor wrote:
         | It works fine for me. Only issue I have is that it has me
         | constantly reaching for the dictionary.
        
         | conception wrote:
         | https://claude.com/blog/the-new-rules-of-context-engineering...
         | 
         | I don't see anyone talking about how you have to completely
         | change your prompting strategies with Op. 5 versus 4.8 to get
         | the most success.
        
       | petercooper wrote:
       | Hopefully this boils down to the smaller versions they've teased.
       | In my experience, Qwen models are the closest to the "less
       | knowledge, more intelligence" (yes, the two are hugely
       | correlated!) ideal some tool-dependent tasks need. Even the 3.5
       | 2B can be easily prompted to always lean on tools and not jump to
       | false conclusions (although its actual coding skills are abysmal,
       | as you'd expect).
        
         | quotemstr wrote:
         | > less knowledge, more intelligence
         | 
         | People produce such models by over-RL-ing smaller models on
         | math and coding tasks. I've found the results capable of
         | neither innovative work nor thinking outside the box. They're
         | straight-A students raised by tiger moments who never let them
         | play freely for hours in the dirt.
         | 
         | Perhaps you could say such models are _skilled_ --- but
         | intelligent? Not by my measure.
         | 
         | People and AIs alike need diversity of experience and a broad
         | liberal arts education to see hidden connections between fields
         | and make real advances.
        
           | DC-3 wrote:
           | It's amusing to me that AI has become sophisticated enough
           | that people have started being racist to it.
        
           | petercooper wrote:
           | I agree with you to an extent, but you have certainly given
           | me food for thought.
           | 
           | Sticking to LLMs, they seemingly get their intelligence
           | (whatever that really means) _from_ building models rich with
           | knowledge, so you could have a point. But Qwen models seem to
           | be _particularly_ good, even at small model sizes, at
           | maintaining both their own knowledge while acquiescing to and
           | integrating external information in the moment.
        
       | looksjjhg wrote:
       | That took what 2 years? I love how the chip ban made them more
       | efficient
        
         | Footprint0521 wrote:
         | Facts lol, now all the Chinese models are 1/40th of the cost
         | for the same intelligence
        
       | ben8bit wrote:
       | Haven't tried this yet, but going to soon! I have to wonder what
       | happened at Anthropic. We've cancelled our subscription in favor
       | of OpenCode & Codex. Sol is just so good & OC goes so far for
       | every $ spent. Claude's become a pain to work with - average
       | output with an annoying personality. Who knew this would be an
       | issue even a year ago? In any case, loving the stuff from the
       | Chinese models!
        
         | tomComb wrote:
         | > an annoying personality
         | 
         | I was with you until there. Qwen and the OpenAI models are
         | great, aggressive agents, but they're not as good as the
         | anthropic models for human interaction. They just don't have
         | the subtlety, understanding, or attention to detail.
        
           | ben8bit wrote:
           | Really? I've heard so many other people complain about this
           | recently. And maybe it's possible that it's the prompt style
           | even. But interesting that it's not across the board.
        
           | colingauvin wrote:
           | Claude 4.5/4.6 - absolutely agree. Fable 5? From my (limited)
           | testing, also reasonable to interact with.
           | 
           | Opus 4.7/4.8/5? Absolutely smug and antagonistic and preachy.
           | I'm constantly fighting with it to stop fighting me and
           | accept that I occasionally know better. It's really
           | frustrating to spend so many tokens of such an expensive
           | model arguing with it.
        
       | theropost wrote:
       | Anthropic is a bit nuts, I had $260 of credits on my max account
       | for the extra usage the other night. It was expiring, so I
       | figured I'll fire up an agentic swarm to deep dive and make some
       | deep changes to some old cold bases.. literally 25 minutes or
       | less, $260 burnt, it didn't get get into the implementation, just
       | wrote a ton of useless plans for the most part. It really opened
       | my eyes to what they expect to charge people.. wayyyy overpriced.
        
         | polishdude20 wrote:
         | You should just spend those towards a cursor subscription.
        
         | cortesoft wrote:
         | It's crazy how different the credit cost and subscription cost
         | are.
         | 
         | With the $200 subscription, I can have Fable on ultracode
         | working for hours and not dent the usage limits.
        
           | AlexandrB wrote:
           | VCs are footing the bill for that $200 subscription.
        
             | ericd wrote:
             | They have something like 80% gross margins, are at a
             | $100B/yr ARR, and are growing at 10x per year... If that
             | keeps up, they're going to be doing more revenue than
             | Google in a year ($400B ARR, 20% per year growth)
        
               | dexwiz wrote:
               | How can you sanely project the last 12 months forward? We
               | have seen a huge uptick in usage. Last summer AI was a
               | toy to most devs, now every enterprise developer I talked
               | to uses it every day. Coding agent providers are surely
               | going to hit market saturation in the near future.
        
               | ericd wrote:
               | Maybe, maybe not. Personally, I hope local AI eats their
               | lunch so that the benefits are more decentralized and
               | accrue more to society generally.
               | 
               | I don't think you're right about that last prediction, at
               | all. And new use cases are opening up as these get
               | smarter. I think things are going to get pretty weird.
               | 
               | But the point was that it really doesn't look like
               | they're losing money on users, on average.
        
               | senordevnyc wrote:
               | Where did that $100B figure come from? I thought they
               | were at ~10B at the end of 2025, so they're either not at
               | 100B yet, or they're growing way faster than 10x / year.
        
             | ux266478 wrote:
             | At last, a valid usecase for VCs.
        
               | dionian wrote:
               | i'll take it, just hope they dont rugpull us soon. im
               | sure its coming
        
             | riknos314 wrote:
             | The $200 sub is customer acquisition cost to hook devs that
             | then become the marketing team trying to get their company
             | to bring in Claude (at the highly profitable API price).
        
           | notatoad wrote:
           | yeah, i tried out GLM-5.2 when the news was all full of hype
           | for that, and it's fine... definitely better value that API
           | rates for claude. but comparing the value i got from that to
           | the value i get from a claude max subscription... claude is
           | way cheaper.
        
         | aenis wrote:
         | I managed to lose around $300 in credits I had saved for some
         | emergency /fast sessions the following way: switch to Fable.
         | Work on the design. Downgrade to Opus for the build. If _any_
         | of other parallel Opus session has  /fast enabled it seems to
         | enable it for the newly spawned session by default. Before I
         | knew it, the $300 was gone. I think the bug is now solved, but
         | it was rather unpleasant. I dont ever remember bugs that would
         | drain my wallet - with claude code its just another Tuesday.
         | Still love it.
        
           | tempest_ wrote:
           | I dont love it.
           | 
           | Opus 5 is just a token burner.
           | 
           | I use fable plan and spawn opus 4.8 workflows which seems to
           | work alright.
        
             | robbru wrote:
             | Opus 5 loves to stop working "for safety reasons" and shuts
             | down the session! I avoid it at all costs now. Opus 4.8 has
             | been my default as well.
        
             | aenis wrote:
             | I suspect it must depend on how one manages their codebase
             | - wrt to docs, ADRs, and general guardrails.
             | 
             | For me it is not great for design work - Fable is way
             | better, and 4.8 was conservative and thus better (Opus 5
             | seems to jump to conclusions far more eagerly). But for
             | overnight builds, where I give it 8hrs worth of work on
             | LLDs created by Fable - its great. Where Opus 4.8 would
             | often lose the plot and stop for questions clearly answered
             | in the LLD - Opus 5 does manage to complete. Since it
             | launched, I don't remember it ever disappointing me with
             | builds. But designs? Boy, is this thing explosively stupid
             | sometimes.
        
             | ethin wrote:
             | For me it's the opposite: I don't have $200 plus to throw
             | at Anthropic every Month, and when I do get to use Fable it
             | rips through my usage credits like there's absolutely no
             | tomorrow.
             | 
             | Of course, the hilarious thing to me is that Anthropic
             | likes to claim that the usage limits are because of
             | resource allocation problems or something like that.
             | Obviously no such issue exists, otherwise they wouldn't
             | allow you to bypass it by just paying a bit more and it
             | would be a hard limit. So usage credits are entirely their
             | way of just screwing you out of more money.
        
           | gnull wrote:
           | Claude code is just pool quality. They don't make how this
           | thing will behave clear to the user, or give control. They
           | fail at anything that needs an abstraction or model, not just
           | APIs and shell scripts glued together. And "just ask AI"
           | seems to be the default fix.
           | 
           | That vibe coding they brag about as if it was a good thing,
           | it shows.
           | 
           | Take their notation for describing permissions. The docs are
           | not comprehensive, and in practice it doesn't quite work how
           | they describe it.
           | 
           | Or their management of sub-agents. I once lost a sub-agent,
           | it finished and disappeared from UI. Apparently, you can't
           | bring it back yourself: you have to ask the parent agent to
           | do it for you. But the parent was Fable, and I ran out of
           | credits, so I was locked out of using my opus sub-agent
           | because of it.
           | 
           | Or an even more grotesque example: when you paste your claude
           | API token to authorize, it covers characters with *. But it
           | seems like an LLM has hallucinated a limit of API key length
           | and the tail of your key stays visible.
        
             | thejosh wrote:
             | so many ridiculous "how the fuck did this get through basic
             | QA?" issues with Claude Code.
             | 
             | I can't believe how many critical bugs fall through.
             | 
             | My favourite one is the bug where Plan mode can execute
             | destructive commands inadvertently.
             | 
             | Then all these get closed with `Closing for now -- inactive
             | for too long. Please open a new issue if this is still
             | relevant.`. Awesome.
        
               | formerly_proven wrote:
               | > I can't believe how many critical bugs fall through.
               | 
               | Almost like CC is 100% vibe coded.
        
               | ethin wrote:
               | I mean. This is what happens with vibe-coded projects.
               | When there's no actual software engineering going on, I
               | wouldn't expect anything better than this.
        
             | hungryhobbit wrote:
             | What amazes me is how, for a vibe coded product where all
             | they have to do is use their AI to fix things ... NOTHING
             | EVER GETS FIXED!
             | 
             | I've probably gone to file 20 bugs. In all 20 cases there
             | wasn't just one issue already filed for it: there were
             | several, each which had a bunch of upvotes. And in all 20
             | cases ... every. last. one. ... Anthropic closed the ticket
             | with no comment.
             | 
             | IF YOU ARE GOING TO HAVE A SHITTY VIBE CODED PRODUCT, AT
             | LEAST USE YOUR SHITTY AI TO FIX THE SHITTY PROBLEMS!
        
         | mikae1 wrote:
         | And at that cost they're still not profitable. It's going to be
         | a bumpy road ahead...
        
           | arrowleaf wrote:
           | I thought they are making a profit on API pricing? A quick
           | Google shows somewhere between 50-70% margins on API
           | inference.
        
             | bakugo wrote:
             | API pricing is almost definitely profitable, but at this
             | point I assume it's a small minority of their inference
             | traffic compared to subscription usage, and unlikely to
             | make up for the rest of their expenses on its own.
        
               | enedil wrote:
               | Why would you assume so when companies 150+ people can
               | only use API pricing? My assumption is that more people
               | use Claude at work than personally.
        
           | tyre wrote:
           | People keep saying this but from what we've seen, Anthropic
           | models are marginally profitable and earn back their costs
           | over their lifetime. The company is burning money building
           | the next versions and other ventures (e.g. verticals), but
           | the models themselves have been profitable.
        
             | gamblor956 wrote:
             | They're EBITDA profitable, not GAAP profitable.
        
           | an0malous wrote:
           | What's the blast radius of this bubble popping? It's all
           | private investment still right?
        
             | bhewes wrote:
             | Two thirds of most of the DC builds are not compute. So
             | it's a CRE play the last leg holding up that mess.
        
           | arikrahman wrote:
           | Meanwhile I can do all that and more with reasonix harness
           | for Deepseek with a cache hit rate of 99%. And that's with
           | unsubsidized American providers like cloudflare or Digital
           | Ocean
        
           | swalsh wrote:
           | I think profitability is a matter of accounting. Inference is
           | where money is made, but training is where money is spent. We
           | keep getting new models every few months, but frankly the old
           | models are still quite usable. I suspect labs will soon start
           | specializing in expert models per use case so they can
           | increase the lifespan of individual models, and change the
           | profitability per model.
        
             | CuriouslyC wrote:
             | That's not the only reason to go to expert models. The more
             | different domains you try to stuff in there, the more
             | parameters the model needs to keep things coherent and not
             | overload tokens in a way that induces errors. For example,
             | if a model trained only on biology text sees "sonic
             | hedgehog" there's no ambiguity, and this compounds for all
             | the things that are "overloaded," in the training corpus,
             | which turns out to be quite a bit.
        
         | criddell wrote:
         | > wayyy overpriced
         | 
         | Maybe they consider that hiring a person to do it would have
         | cost at least as much and taken much more time, so paying them
         | is a bargain.
        
           | echelon wrote:
           | Yeah, but now we can hire the Chinese instead for 1/100th the
           | cost. It's an even better deal.
           | 
           | Plus we get to own, keep, run, do whatever with the model. We
           | don't feel trapped. Moreover, it's something we can truly
           | build on top of and own our own destiny.
           | 
           | Anthropic and OpenAI are the new Oracle (Oracle pre-AI;
           | Oracle is even worse now). Expensive, feels like dealing with
           | a lawyer, and not at all open. They just became infinitely
           | less cool than they were a month ago.
           | 
           | The whole of our industry is going to migrate to open
           | weights. We're smart enough to know this is the better deal
           | and technical enough to be able to pull it off.
           | 
           | The only thing that might save these OpenAI and Anthropic in
           | the near-term is an abundance of enterprise contracts
           | negotiated with non-tech companies. They'll soak consulting
           | firms and F500 companies for "AI" integrations.
        
             | criddell wrote:
             | > the new Oracle
             | 
             | I think that's exactly what they are going for - enterprise
             | and government customers.
        
         | pvtmert wrote:
         | Anthropic is the new AWS.
         | 
         | Amazon's first principle is the Customer Obsession. Making
         | customers happy.
         | 
         | Fun bit is that the human psychology rates personal looking
         | fixes better than having no issues at all.
         | 
         | For example, AWS overcharges you, you contact support, and more
         | or less hassle free they refund or issue credits. The customer
         | feels appreciated, or at least got something "extra" or
         | "special treatment".
         | 
         | Meanwhile, any other (small) cloud. Simple, no weird charges.
         | Even _most_ of network egress is free. But, no reason to call
         | support or feel "extraordinary". Comes out as "meh" against
         | Amazon's "top tier" support model...
        
           | john01dav wrote:
           | Anthropic's constant changing of its mind leads to
           | instability which leads to unhappy customers
        
           | axpy906 wrote:
           | I've never gotten a refund from Athropic.
        
           | riknos314 wrote:
           | Aws is an infrastructure company that builds services on top
           | of that infra to sell more of it at a higher margin.
           | 
           | Anthropic trains models on AWS's (and GCPs, and Microslop's)
           | infrastructure, then skims margin off of selling inference
           | also on the infrastructure owned by the other companies.
           | 
           | These are extremely different businesses.
        
         | swalsh wrote:
         | Its tough to go from max account at home and pay per usage
         | enterprise account at work with heavy usage limits... but the
         | limits are there because pricing is insane. Feel like I'm in
         | the $5 Uber rides phase at home.
        
           | hahahaa wrote:
           | The Chinese models are the public transport in the uber
           | analogy. Once the price the goes up catch the bus!
        
             | swalsh wrote:
             | Lol perfect analogy. I'm still paying for claude because
             | the quality is unmatched.
        
         | hahahaa wrote:
         | You plugged in a space heater on a roofless house.
         | 
         | There is some element of responsibility on the user to guide
         | and monitor the model/harness and not let it rip to burn
         | tokens.
        
         | tarnith wrote:
         | Hint: The new models are really good at burning tokens.
         | 
         | I've had to use it a bit for work, and it's been remarkable
         | watching the degradation in performance with the default
         | suggested current models (Opus 5 as a prime example) vs the
         | models that got them huge attention a year ago (Opus 4.6)
         | 
         | If you give 4.6 a spec, or existing code to implement a feature
         | in, it will ask some pointed questions if there's something
         | unclear in the spec, and then produce a plan and move to
         | implement it.
         | 
         | 5 will freak out at even a basic task, ask itself if it's own
         | assumptions or your instructions are correct, proceed to re-
         | assess it's own plan, and it's instructions 3-4 times, and then
         | maybe produce code after burning several hundred thousand
         | tokens (and quite a bit of time) analyzing existing code and
         | thoroughly sweeping it for irrelevant problems both to the task
         | it was given and the spec it came up with.
         | 
         | It's quite bizarre to me how well advertised the benchmarks and
         | anecdotes from people one shotting MVP browser games are,
         | compared to the experience of everyone I know that's had to
         | actually use it to accomplish even a relatively basic task.
        
         | brynnbee wrote:
         | I had same experience with OpenAI. I have the $200/month plan
         | and use 5.6 Sol all the time. What would normally use about 2%
         | of my _weekly_ allowance burned through $100 of credits in 40
         | minutes.
        
       | d2p wrote:
       | I clicked through and it showed Qwen at the top at 55.4 compared
       | to 55.3 for Opus Max. I have a screenshot.
       | 
       | Then I clicked away and back, and now it goes Qwen second, with
       | 58.4, to Opus Max at top with 59.2.
       | 
       | I have screenshots of both. The description above the chart is
       | the same in boh cases:
       | 
       | > Artificial Analysis Agentic Index > Represents the weighted
       | average of agentic capabilities benchmarks in the Artificial
       | Analysis Intelligence Index (GDPval-AA v2, 3-Banking)
       | 
       | What happened? How can the scores change so much in a few
       | seconds?
        
         | h14h wrote:
         | They JUST updated their methodology:
         | 
         | https://artificialanalysis.ai/methodology/intelligence-bench...
         | 
         | Edit to provide AA's article explaining it:
         | 
         | https://artificialanalysis.ai/articles/artificial-analysis-i...
        
           | ahartmetz wrote:
           | Fixed the result, eh? In both senses of the word.
        
           | gpt5 wrote:
           | What was the change?
        
           | johnnyApplePRNG wrote:
           | I have been suspicious of these AI leaderboard sites for some
           | time now, and this only increases that suspicion.
        
           | torginus wrote:
           | In that case they should clearly label that this is a new
           | benchmark.
        
           | splatzone wrote:
           | Can someone please explain what changed, when it happened,
           | and whether it was surreptitious?
        
           | kmeh wrote:
           | > HLE, AA-LCR and AA-Omniscience are now graded by GPT-5.6
           | Luna (medium), replacing GPT-4o, Qwen3 235B A22B 2507, and
           | Gemini 3 Flash Preview respectively. These checks are now
           | unified under a more capable modern model, selected for
           | strong agreement with human judgment in our grader validation
           | 
           | Interesting that they chose a nano-sized model from OpenAI to
           | be a grader for benchmarks involving knowledge and
           | hallucination.
        
             | nolok wrote:
             | What's interesting is that if you ask 5.6 Sol or Opus 5
             | they will tell you it's a bad idea to have the reviewer be
             | the dumber of the set as it can't judge them properly to
             | decide who is right, and thus if one is better because it
             | found an answer that's better but contradict the obvious it
             | would be biased against. I know because I just had a
             | consensus conversation with them this afternoon about a
             | design that was similar (though about something completly
             | different than judging agentic quality or whatever).
        
         | WD-42 wrote:
         | Same, they just updated it. Hacker news effect?
        
         | apitman wrote:
         | Welp. That didn't last long
        
         | personjerry wrote:
         | They should probably freeze the results before publishing.
        
         | Gcam wrote:
         | Hey! George from the Artificial Analysis team here. We
         | published an update today that does result in a change of the
         | order, Qwen3.8 Max to second rather than first. The methodology
         | change was an already planned upgrade to our equality
         | checking/grader models, and brings the latest 3-Banking version
         | to Artificial Analysis. Regular updates are normal for us to
         | keep our benchmarks up to date.
         | 
         | The order changes but I think the story discussed in this
         | thread holds - this is a very impressive release and Qwen3.8
         | Max is a huge step up in agentic capabilities.
         | 
         | Relevant blog post (also linked to by others):
         | https://artificialanalysis.ai/articles/artificial-analysis-i...
        
           | saretup wrote:
           | You gotta admit the timing looks very suspicious.
        
             | TacticalCoder wrote:
             | > You gotta admit the timing looks very suspicious.
             | 
             | Do you mean the timing looks like: _" We're SV tech-bros.
             | Our benchmarks showed a chinese model above what's
             | considered the best model at the moment. So we quickly
             | modified the benchmark so that our SV tech-bros don't look
             | like they're losing to a chinese model"_?
             | 
             | That's indeed a bit fishy.
        
             | Maxious wrote:
             | Luna pricing was just cut by 80%
             | https://www.eesel.ai/blog/gpt-5-6-pricing and as the blog
             | post states is a more accurate judge than the previous
             | methodology.
        
       | atemerev wrote:
       | Well, that's the bad index then. It is barely usable in my
       | opinion compared to other Chinese frontier models.
        
         | ramon156 wrote:
         | which one of the other chinese frontier models is better?
        
       | h14h wrote:
       | This has me hopeful for Qwen3.8-27B!
        
       | camnora wrote:
       | Qwen is just crushing it overall. I regularly use 3.7-flash for
       | everyday coding needs and it gets the job done.
        
       | seizethecheese wrote:
       | Opus is still first in Intelligence Index followed by Fable, GPT
       | 5.6, Kimi K3 then Qwen 3.8 max.
       | https://artificialanalysis.ai/#intelligence
       | 
       | Our leaderboard combines Arena ELO, AA Intelligence index,
       | latency and speed and goes: #1 Opus 5 #2 Kimi K3 #3 Qwen3.8 Max
       | #4 GPT 5.6 Sol
       | 
       | Source: http://pellmell.ai/leaderboard.
       | 
       | This jumps around a lot based on the top throughput and latency
       | of whatever provider happens to be best at the moment.
        
         | d4rkp4ttern wrote:
         | All these "intelligence" benchmarks miss something extremely
         | important when using an LLM in a code-agent harness: How it
         | communicates with you about what it did.
         | 
         | Opus-5 is practically unusable (for complex tasks) in this
         | sense - its updates are voluminous, and dense with cryptic
         | language (there are numerous reddit threads complaining about
         | this, so it's not just me). I often have to ask it to re-state
         | concisely in plain terms.
         | 
         | For a fairly gnarly task, after fighting with with Claude-Code
         | + Opus-5, I ported my session to Codex + GPT-5.6-sol, and it
         | was like a breath of fresh air.
         | 
         | Arguably a key aspect of intelligence is concise, clear
         | communication, and current benchmarks miss that, at least as
         | far as I'm aware. I would think some arena-type benchmarks
         | where humans rate responses would measure this, though I'm not
         | sure which those are.
        
           | moffkalast wrote:
           | Damn I thought it was my extra instructions, I swear
           | everything it writes is in some shorthand with direct
           | references to variables that literally nobody could figure
           | out unless you literally just wrote that code 5 minutes ago.
           | I had it stop writing comments altogether cause it was always
           | four lines of complete and utter nonsense, and it doesn't
           | even obey that rule half the time. Despite doing an extensive
           | back and forth to make a complete plan, 5 seconds into the
           | implementation it changes its mind and makes another
           | assumption, adding some extra thing that tends to break the
           | entire approach and needs follow-ups to repair or cleanup.
           | Instruction following is basically non-existent compared to
           | Fable, it just does whatever the fuck it wants.
        
             | fearmerchant wrote:
             | Everything is load-bearing with 3 measured blockers.
        
               | pixelready wrote:
               | Don't forget the smoking guns! I think these new models
               | have been reading too many Agatha Christie novels.
        
           | jiggawatts wrote:
           | GPT 5.6 has similar language quirks that makes its comments
           | nearly unusable.
           | 
           | I wonder if this is a side effect of MoE models -- they can
           | write excellent prose, but not simultaneously with writing
           | code.
        
             | notfromhere wrote:
             | I think it's just where they focused RLHF resources. The
             | models have generally only gotten worse at writing.
             | 
             | And writing doesn't have validators like code so you can't
             | really scale it in the same way
        
           | chpatrick wrote:
           | Is that what it feels like when the models get smarter than
           | us?
        
             | micw wrote:
             | Guess that's the exact point of the "intelligence"
             | benchmarks
        
             | gpt5 wrote:
             | A smarter model would know how to communicate with you
             | correctly, and not just throw jargon it has just invented
             | at you without explaining it.
        
               | IanCal wrote:
               | s/model/engineer
        
               | chpatrick wrote:
               | But if you have two experts in a field talking to each
               | other you wouldn't expect them to dumb down their
               | communication.
        
               | riknos314 wrote:
               | Effective jargon usage is understood by the target
               | audience.
               | 
               | If the AI is communicating to me and can't select the
               | appropriate jargon level, it's failing at communicating
               | effectively.
        
               | chpatrick wrote:
               | Or you're below its level.
        
               | ranguna wrote:
               | That's a loadbearing, heavy shaped, second take worthy
               | statement
        
               | cloverich wrote:
               | Concise, jargon free or limited explanation is the
               | opposite of dumbed down. It requires to most skill and
               | understanding to do well. Opus 4.8/5, for whatever
               | reason, are getting worse at this crucial skill.
        
             | HappyPanacea wrote:
             | No, a smart model should also give a concise executive
             | summary, "brevity is the soul of wit".
        
               | a2ff6eeb0 wrote:
               | So, in short, once models get smart enough they stop
               | bothering telling us what they did.
               | 
               | Yeah, makes sense. A parent wouldn't bother explaining
               | the details of their job to a toddler.
        
               | FridgeSeal wrote:
               | Which would be fine, but the parents also just smeared
               | tomato sauce over the walls too, so let's not get too
               | ahead of ourselves.
        
             | computably wrote:
             | "There is a view in some philosophical circles that
             | anything that can be understood by people who have not
             | studied philosophy is not profound enough to be worth
             | saying. To the contrary, I suspect that whatever cannot be
             | said clearly is probably not being thought clearly either."
        
             | msp26 wrote:
             | No the models are just ass at communication without being
             | directed.
             | 
             | Try asking them to make useful diagrams for some stuff in a
             | codebase, out of the box without excessive hand holding
             | they don't make good choices about what's worth
             | communicating and how to do it.
             | 
             | You see this in their pointless frontend copy all the time
             | too.
        
               | embedding-shape wrote:
               | Like any time you make them do any UI without strict
               | directions they'll almost always add a label describing
               | the feature somewhere. Ask for a calculator, and
               | instructions for what the different buttons do might
               | appear in the bottom out of nowhere for example.
               | 
               | Same concept of "over-sharing" seems to prevalent in a
               | bunch of domains when it comes to LLMs, sometimes more
               | visible, sometimes less.
        
           | satvikpendem wrote:
           | Eh I don't know, I care whether it gets the job done and I
           | can see the difference when I review the code, not how well
           | it needs to explain the code to me, I can just read it
           | myself.
        
           | veber-alex wrote:
           | It takes 2 minutes to fix Opus 5
           | 
           | https://code.claude.com/docs/en/output-styles
        
             | veber-alex wrote:
             | lol. I am being downvoted for trying to help people out.
             | 
             | This community is pure trash.
        
               | HDBaseT wrote:
               | Instead, you should say something like:
               | 
               | "You can adjust the output style in your
               | '.claude/settings.local.json' file".
               | 
               | OR
               | 
               | "You can decrease verbosity by doing x, y and z."
        
           | octoberfranklin wrote:
           | > and dense with cryptic language
           | 
           | Yeah if you ask it a medical question, it answers in that
           | impenetrable jargony style that clinical journals use... full
           | of unnecessarily custom adjectives ("orthopedic" instead of
           | "of the bone") and discipline-specific terms (anterior,
           | distal) even when the user didn't display mastry of this
           | terminology (hint to frontier labs: add training cases for
           | this; it will improve your model's usability).
           | 
           | My theory is that LLMs perceive the writing styles of various
           | fields as being like different (but related) languages, and
           | they're inclined to answer a question in the language of its
           | source material unless specifically asked otherwise. If you
           | add "ELI5" the model treats it as a question plus a
           | translation task.
           | 
           | I think this is why programming questions are answered with
           | an exaggerated cringey form of HN-speak ("load bearing",
           | "gate" as a verb, "dissolves") by some models.
        
             | plaguuuuuu wrote:
             | it's like asking a developer to explain something.
             | 
             | I always get Haiku to rephrase anything human-facing.
        
         | hungryhobbit wrote:
         | It seems like if latency is having such a big effect that it's
         | changing the winners, maybe your tests are awful and shouldn't
         | be so latency dependent?
         | 
         | I mean, I get it: how fast a model responds is relevant. But a
         | test that changes second by second is far less relevant than a
         | test that tells you how smart the model is, and _accounts for_
         | latency in some way that isn 't constantly changing the result.
        
           | seizethecheese wrote:
           | Latency isn't changing the results for the coding index or
           | arena ELO, but neither of those take latency or throughput
           | into account, so we added those to our leaderboard as score
           | components.
           | 
           | Latency and throughput matter a ton as a user, so I think
           | it's actually totally defensible for a leaderboard to bounce
           | around a lot as these numbers change. The best model to use
           | changes a lot based on these!
        
       | esafak wrote:
       | It is also the most expensive open source frontier model, per
       | task; cf. _Cost per Intelligence Index Task_. If it is as good as
       | the benchmarks indicate it bodes well for Qwen and China. For my
       | part, I 'll pass; it is not on the Pareto frontier.
        
       | Fordec wrote:
       | Anthropic have a real fight on their hands now. The competition
       | is no longer 6 months behind, it's 6 days. If this had come out
       | two or three weeks earlier this would be an absolute market
       | leader on both quality and timeline.
        
       | brettgo1 wrote:
       | Out of curiosity, what's currently the best model I can use
       | locally?
        
         | daemonologist wrote:
         | With an unlimited budget, Kimi K3 (which is quite comparable to
         | this Qwen Max imo). With a normal budget/a PC you might already
         | have, probably Qwen 3.6 27B.
        
         | arjie wrote:
         | $500k - Kimi K3 (maybe $250k? Haven't done this one)
         | 
         | $25k - DSv4 Flash
         | 
         | $4k - Qwen 3.6 35A3B Q5
         | 
         | $1k - Qwen 3.6 27B Q4
         | 
         | Some people prefer the sense over the MoE YMMV.
        
           | apitman wrote:
           | These numbers look about right based on my experiences as
           | well. Though for a single user I think 2x DGX Spark (~$10k)
           | runs DSv4 Flash fairly well right?
        
           | colingauvin wrote:
           | 16 DGX Sparks can run K3 at a reasonable TPS. So that's $64k.
           | 
           | 2 DGX Sparks can run DS4 at 1 million context with 50 TPS so
           | that's $8k.
           | 
           | 1 A4500 can run 35A3B. Those are about $1200 new.
           | 
           | 27B actually takes more hardware to run than 35B because
           | attention is done differently I believe and therefore KV
           | Cache takes a lot of space. It will run on an A4500 but it's
           | slow and context will be like 32k.
        
       | proxyscore wrote:
       | Does it matter, it's all non deterministic bs ware and deepseek
       | is eating the Americans lunch
        
       | bonoboTP wrote:
       | I distrust any benchmark where Opus 5 beats Fable 5.
        
       | jjcm wrote:
       | China has caught up is the main takeaway here. The SOTA models
       | are so close that it's really hard to compare them intelligence
       | wise - you have to get a feel for them yourself and what works
       | for you.
       | 
       | What I'm really excited for is the 27B model. 3.6 is still the
       | king of local, and if 3.8 makes the same improvements it could
       | really legitimately make local viable as a default. I'd love to
       | run a perpetual agent on 3.8 that's locally driven.
        
         | icedrift wrote:
         | I'm still skeptical of the smaller models after the talent
         | exodus a few months ago.
        
           | jimbo808 wrote:
           | At this point I feel like the only factor differentiating
           | SOTA models now is who they're propagandizing you on behalf
           | of (not considering agentic tooling/state management, etc).
        
         | Zambyte wrote:
         | Qwen 3.6 27b is already a viable default. I'm running it on a
         | single 7900 XTX right now for Go development with pi. It's
         | great.
        
           | snapplebobapple wrote:
           | Works great with room to spare on my lenovo pgx too
        
           | bitexploder wrote:
           | I find 35B A3B viable as well, but your harness and runtime
           | really matters to get tool calling and such dialed in. In
           | fact, I would encourage you to experiment with it some as I
           | find I get more reliable output from 35B A3B, though 27B is
           | still generally smarter. A3B with a review cycle or two from
           | 27B is great for me.
           | 
           | One of the reasons is, with good specs and design, A3B is
           | just so fast. It isn't as smart as the 27B model, but it is
           | close enough it can usually figure it out with the right
           | tools.
        
           | monster_truck wrote:
           | Same! The only reason I'm not using it more is because it's
           | summertime. I'm not in any hurry.
           | 
           | Setting the memory to "fast timings" is good for 8-12% more
           | tokens/second if you haven't tried yet. I miss the slightly
           | older days of AMD when powerplay tables were unlocked and we
           | could configure the timings and voltages manually, there's
           | another 30% being left on the table ez
        
             | MrDrMcCoy wrote:
             | What do you mean by 'Setting the memory to "fast timings"'?
             | The only runtime I can get working for my GPUs is
             | llama.cpp, which I haven't seen anything like that in its
             | argument set. My perusal of the options for vllm and sglang
             | didn't suggest anything similar either before failing
             | miserably.
        
         | doginasuit wrote:
         | Another potential takeaway is that the models all gathering
         | around the same point supports the idea that there is a ceiling
         | to LLM capability.
        
           | AustinDev wrote:
           | They always all gather around the same spot then that spot
           | moves every 6-9 months. I think the clustering is more likely
           | evidence of distillation. I don't personally think
           | distillation is a bad thing. If the LLM providers can distill
           | all of human output into their models for 'free'. I don't
           | think distilling a model from the output of those models is
           | morally wrong.
        
             | michelsedgh wrote:
             | What an interesting take. One question, do you think
             | stealing from a thief is morally okay? I'm just asking no
             | judgement on my side.
        
               | AussieWog93 wrote:
               | I'd say it's more "Downloading LimeWire Pro from
               | LimeWire" than actual theft.
        
               | dullcrisp wrote:
               | Why isn't it more like building a hardware store using
               | lumber you purchased from a competing hardware store? Or
               | founding a school using an education you obtained at a
               | different school?
        
               | ygjb wrote:
               | Because that doesn't satisfy the narrative of American
               | exceptionalism. It's easier to point at something and say
               | it was stolen or copied than it is to compete, especially
               | with the political climate in the US.
               | 
               | This isn't an anti-American sentiment. It is an anti-
               | corporate/regulatory capture/embrace and extinguish
               | sentiment (which probably reads the same to many people
               | these days).
        
               | Gigachad wrote:
               | If the legal system declares the first thief's theft not
               | theft then all bets are off.
        
               | BeetleB wrote:
               | > If the legal system declares the first thief's theft
               | not theft
               | 
               | But they didn't find it. The Big LLM provider accepted
               | guilt and paid a fine.
               | 
               | You can argue whether it was a fair amount they paid, but
               | there is no legal precedent that was set. It's still
               | considered theft.
        
               | kennywinker wrote:
               | As i understand it, they accepted guilt for downloading
               | stuff illegally. They didn't accept guilt for
               | incorporating all of human output into their model
               | without consent.
        
               | TheOtherHobbes wrote:
               | Copyright law only considers illegal ownership of a work,
               | so the crime - or tort - was making/acquiring copies
               | without permission or payment.
               | 
               | Training from copies has been ruled fair use because it's
               | "transformative" and not simply "derivative."
               | 
               | This is obviously debatable, but that's where the debate
               | is at the moment.
        
               | michelsedgh wrote:
               | So basically because they just browsed and used the
               | information that was mostly public on the internet and
               | they didnt copy it, they just learned from it and thats
               | fine. Which makes sense. None of the llms let u copy
               | someones work exactly anyways... makes total sense
               | honestly. So in this case what happens to distilling? Is
               | that also learning or ur trying to get to their actual
               | weights by kind of reverse engineering it? Where would
               | the argument fall there?
        
               | kennywinker wrote:
               | > but that's where the debate is at the moment.
               | 
               | Because of the rulings of a couple of judges. Is that
               | actually what the majority of _people_ think?
               | 
               | > Copyright law only considers illegal ownership of a
               | work
               | 
               | That's definitely not true. File sharing, for example, is
               | illegal even if you legally own the original copy you're
               | sharing.
               | 
               | Similarly, copyright has something to say if I read a
               | legal copy of harry potter and then create a new work in
               | that world.
        
               | BeetleB wrote:
               | > They didn't accept guilt for incorporating all of human
               | output into their model without consent.
               | 
               | Because that use case is actually permitted by law.
        
               | kennywinker wrote:
               | I mean... that's one interpretation of the law, sure.
               | 
               | The law was written before the idea of an LLM existed,
               | and some judges in some specific cases decided the
               | previous law covered this usage.
               | 
               | So, it comes down to if you believe a couple judges
               | ruling on a couple cases is the right way to determine a
               | world-altering new legal framework.
        
               | nolok wrote:
               | > But they didn't find it. The Big LLM provider accepted
               | guilt and paid a fine.
               | 
               | That's not how it works. You have to give it back.
               | 
               | Otherwise, the distiller can just pay a fine (no larger
               | than the original did) and be okay then, right ?
        
               | throwaway27448 wrote:
               | True. It's the courts that failed humanity. Or perhaps
               | the shits that invented copyright to start
        
               | mannanj wrote:
               | Is it theft if another thief steal's the first thief's
               | theft?
        
               | itemize123 wrote:
               | question's phrasing made your judgement obvious
        
             | ofjcihen wrote:
             | I gathered that the most recent advances haven't been in
             | capabilities of the model but more the way that it's able
             | to be employed (most recently agents).
        
             | conception wrote:
             | If you talk to the Chinese models, even super smart Qwen
             | 3.8, you can tell they are distilled just from the verbal
             | ticks they have. Gemini, ChatGPT and Claude do not sound
             | alike. The Chinese models 100% sound like one of the 3,
             | usually Claude. American models are load bearing for this
             | LLM generation seam.
        
               | kayson wrote:
               | - load bearing -
        
               | AustinDev wrote:
               | seams, boundaries, envelopes, etc
        
             | FuckButtons wrote:
             | That's definitely my impression of deepseek 0731 after a
             | fair bit of use via ds4, it sounds like Claude.
        
             | bossyTeacher wrote:
             | > LLM providers can distill all of human output into their
             | models for 'free'
             | 
             | Not sure what part of being charged guilty and paying a
             | fine you see as "free".
        
             | rlupi wrote:
             | I think it's more likely to be the effect of
             | synchronization of launches, and the fact that models that
             | do not challenge SOTA in some way do not get launched
             | (think Gemini Pro delays), launched quietly or do not get
             | any attention.
        
           | rllearneratwork wrote:
           | the ceiling is to eval's quality
        
           | sscaryterry wrote:
           | Don't say that too loud, you may burst the bubble
           | prematurely.
        
           | CMay wrote:
           | Or are humans more of a bottleneck than before, because to
           | improve on the most complex problems that demonstrate
           | intelligence you need some way to verify that they are
           | correct. If it's hard for humans to even know if something is
           | correct, wouldn't that slow everything down and simply put
           | limits on the scaling speed of models based on human
           | verification?
           | 
           | So instead of relying heavily on human bottlenecks, you focus
           | on agentic task verification since that's the low hanging
           | fruit and verifiable at scale?
        
             | edg5000 wrote:
             | Very interesting point you make! Before LLMs I had a theory
             | that we cannot make something more intelligent/complex than
             | us.
             | 
             | LLMs are certainly more knowledgable, but maybe not more
             | intelligent, arguably. It's possible we're approacing a
             | ceiling indeed.
             | 
             | Model capability might be on an asymptote appraching but
             | never quite reaching parity with human intelligence.
        
           | miki123211 wrote:
           | I don't think there's a ceiling to LLM capability. I do think
           | that many software dev tasks are just far below that ceiling,
           | and the gains to most dev work won't be that large from now
           | on.
           | 
           | Where the new generation of LLMs (Fable, Sol) shines is tasks
           | that are much harder than typical soft eng, yet that still
           | have a verifiable answer, think mathematical proofs or
           | exploits. I think there's still a good amount of low-hanging
           | fruit in those (and similar) areas.
           | 
           | The next frontier after that is tasks that don't have
           | automatically-verifiable answers, and may not even have
           | correct and incorrect ones in the strictest sense of the
           | word.
           | 
           | Reasonable lawyers might disagree on the question of "which
           | trial strategy do I use given the following set of facts."
           | There are answers that are clearly wrong, but being able to
           | choose between many plausibly-correct ones requires many
           | years of lawyering and seeing many trials play out. I do
           | suspect that most lawyers are far below the ceiling that a
           | hypothetical immortal lawyer that has practiced for an
           | infinite amount of time would have achieved.
        
         | monster_truck wrote:
         | Something I don't think many have internalized is that China
         | has been as good or better for quite a while now (long before
         | anyone was pointing distillation fingers) and enough people
         | have finally tried it for themselves that the understanding has
         | reached critical mass and the careful narrative of american
         | companies is collapsing.
         | 
         | When I finally put $15 into Deepseek and it beat the brakes off
         | Codex 5.5 on multiple rather complex projects without any of
         | the obnoxious mistakes, I was sick to my stomach with buyers
         | remorse. I couldn't believe I ever felt like I was getting my
         | moneys worth at $200/mo. I wouldn't even use OAI's models if
         | they were free and unlimited at this point, I'll happily pay
         | for what I already know works. No reset bingo, no cache errors,
         | no annoying shitposters as a primary source of info. Oh, and I
         | still had $10 of tokens left
         | 
         | And yes, 3.6 is excellent locally. The rest of this year is
         | gonna be awesome
        
           | aliasxneo wrote:
           | And I had the opposite experience. It's a really interesting
           | phenomenon that I can't really explain. My co-founder swears
           | by Deepseek and yet just the other day we were conversing and
           | he was telling me about some of the issues with the way the
           | AI was behaving and trying to show off the cool workarounds
           | he came up with to limit it. I was like, "Interesting, yeah,
           | I've literally never had that problem."
           | 
           | I suspect that the models are genuinely close and that
           | certain experiences get felt across providers but are
           | inconsistent enough to convince people one is superior to the
           | other. I for one have tried Deepseek on and off since my co-
           | founder is fond of it and I've stopped trying now because I
           | never have a good experience.
        
             | wanderlust123 wrote:
             | That's not surprising. I have been using Deepseek and it
             | consistently produces excellent output given the right
             | context howevwr. It depends on the task as it does have
             | blindspots.
        
             | surgical_fire wrote:
             | That may be true.
             | 
             | I switched to DeepSeek entirely once I decided to put 10
             | bucks on it and I realized that it could do whatever I was
             | throwing at Claude or ChatGPT prior to that.
             | 
             | I recommended it to one of my friends, and he was surprised
             | DeepSeek could solve task that Claude got stuck at. I was
             | surprised at it too.
             | 
             | I know others that tried and were less impressed too.
        
           | cyanydeez wrote:
           | I think americans assume when they see a chinese or asian
           | person working at an american business that they "escaped"
           | china as opposed to just being rich enough to go to school
           | abroad. and has little to no bearing on the amount of
           | intelligent going around.
        
             | pessimizer wrote:
             | They've been continuously programmed with insane beliefs
             | about China, which is less shocking when you understand
             | what insane beliefs that they've had programmed into them
             | about their neighbors. The world and your neighborhood are
             | full of evil communists and Nazis who are trying to kill
             | you all the time.
        
               | swat535 wrote:
               | I don't think it's all Americans however there is a
               | portion of them who are not able to grasp the world
               | outside of their borders.
               | 
               | I think it's mainly due to poor education many receive
               | and a very controlled media that suppresses information.
               | 
               | It's shocking considering how much money they spend on
               | education compared to other nations.
        
               | TacticalCoder wrote:
               | > The world and your neighborhood are full of evil
               | communists and Nazis who are trying to kill you all the
               | time.
               | 
               | Don't know about that but your neighbors in Iran in early
               | january happened to be "nice people" who just followed
               | the orders to slaughter 30 000 unarmed civilians.
               | 
               | We could talk about the, what 600 000 deaths, including
               | many civilians, in the Ukraine/Russia war.
               | 
               | Or we could talk about the number of nice palestinians
               | killed since the beginning of the war in Gaza. Or we
               | could go a bit further and talk about the joy and
               | celebration in Gaza after their heroes brought back 200
               | hostages after having slaughtered 1200 civilians.
               | 
               | You may be living in a place that you think shields you
               | from those but I know the ideologies behind these acts.
               | 
               | The fallacy of gray is just that: it's not true that
               | there's always a nice middle ground and that there's no
               | evil ideology out there.
               | 
               | Something something about the price of liberty being
               | eternal vigilance. For there _are_ people abusing your
               | blind trust.
        
               | peterashford wrote:
               | QED
        
             | 14u2c wrote:
             | If Americans see an Asian person working at a US business,
             | they will assume that person is an American. They may even
             | ask what state you are from. It's honestly one of the nice
             | things about the place, you can belong even if you are not
             | from there.
        
           | kadushka wrote:
           | Opus 5 and 5.6 Sol are definitely not smart enough to do my
           | job. They require constant supervision. So why would I want
           | to switch to even worse model? Even if it's just slightly
           | worse?
        
             | Cookingboy wrote:
             | >So why would I want to switch to even worse model?
             | 
             | There would be no reason to if you are in the privileged
             | position where cost isn't an issue.
             | 
             | For the rest of us something that's 95% as good for 20% the
             | price is a hell of a value proposition.
        
               | esafak wrote:
               | That's why every benchmark should show the Pareto
               | frontier against cost and latency.
        
               | FuckButtons wrote:
               | Pareto optimal dominant vs a human for the same task, not
               | an unreasonable framing but that assumes that it can
               | actually do the task, which the op was arguing it
               | couldn't at all. Which, I suppose you could model as the
               | utility of task completion % as being non linear. I have
               | heard many people argue that the nature of work is messy
               | and complicated and many things they do could not easily
               | be emulated or automated. I do wonder how many of those
               | activities are actually something that are connected to a
               | companies ability to generate revenue or are just the
               | messy interactions between people.
        
               | kadushka wrote:
               | Cost is absolutely an issue here - my time is worth
               | approximately $1000/day, so if a slightly worse model
               | wastes one more hour of my time a day than the best
               | model, it costs the company >$2k/mo. Fortunately my
               | employer understands this well and encourages me to use
               | the best models as much as I can.
        
               | surgical_fire wrote:
               | This reply must have cost dozens of dollars.
        
             | matheusmoreira wrote:
             | > So why would I want to switch to even worse model? Even
             | if it's just slightly worse?
             | 
             | Self-hosting is the biggest reason.
        
             | Systemerror7A69 wrote:
             | If they already require your constant supervision the
             | reason is money.
        
             | surgical_fire wrote:
             | > They require constant supervision
             | 
             | I think that may be part of it.
             | 
             | LLMs can be autonomous to an extent. All of them need
             | steering - which is why I feel they are more a superpower
             | the more I am an expert on the subject matter.
             | 
             | The more you want it to be autonomous, than yeah, you may
             | benefit from using the very best the industry has to offer,
             | however slightly better it is.
             | 
             | But if you are always in the loop anyway, you may want to
             | try DeepSeek. You will get similar results for a fraction
             | of the price.
        
           | 4d4m wrote:
           | +1 most people are too afraid to try something new. They've
           | been roughly on par with their frontier offerings for 6
           | months if not more.
        
         | dw_arthur wrote:
         | Who is going to break it to the Americans that China is more
         | than a slight favorite to win an existential battle over which
         | country is better at math?
        
       | londons_explore wrote:
       | I just don't think you can combine speed, latency, price and
       | intelligence into a single useful metric.
       | 
       | Clearly the weighting of those things depends on the usecase
        
       | dangoodmanUT wrote:
       | I'm seeing opus 59.2, Qwen 58.4?
        
       | zmmmmm wrote:
       | The fact that the Chinese models have caught up on benchmarks
       | suggests to me that its likely we will start to transition now
       | into much more of a brand war. It will be subjective qualities
       | that drive our decisions more than measures of absolute
       | intelligence. Already I am choosing models more because I like
       | the personality or style of what they do than because I think
       | they have the absolute highest chance of outputting the most
       | technically correct answer to any given prompt. It will be very
       | interesting to see how things evolve in this direction.
        
         | mindwok wrote:
         | For me now it's simply cost and speed. With GPT5.6 and Fable
         | (and respective open models since then) we passed a threshold
         | where intelligence is sufficient. Now I just need speed of
         | iteration and good prices.
        
       | gerdesj wrote:
       | My vague equivalent of the pelican riding a bicycle test (for a
       | local model without internets) is to ask it: "Where is Yeovil"? I
       | don't expect a totally accurate answer for obvious reasons but I
       | do enjoy watching the accuracy improve.
       | 
       | Qwen3.6-27B-FP8 currently espouses (see below), which is not too
       | bad. The directions are a bit mad but the mileage is about right
       | and there is a helicopter manufacturer here and a RNAS (navy not
       | airforce) museum nearby at Yeovilton. Cosford is in Shropshire
       | which is not a million miles away.
       | 
       | I'm not sure what Pen Di De  means but the river Yeo is correct
       | ... OK ... "basin like" - again not bad, even if Chinese is not
       | the first language here. The model understands that Yeovil is
       | named after (or vice versa or at least is associated with) a
       | river
       | 
       | Yeovil is the current form of Gifle (Saxon) which I thought meant
       | "bend in a river" but WP is currently saying "fork in a river".
       | My source is a local museum. There is a fork but was it there
       | 2000 odd years ago? My hydrology skills say ... possibly
       | 
       | ---------------------------------------------------- Q: where is
       | yeovil:
       | 
       | Yeovil is a town in Somerset, in the South West of England.
       | 
       | It is located roughly:                   25 miles (40 km) south-
       | west of Exeter         60 miles (100 km) west of Bristol
       | 140 miles (225 km) west-south-west of London
       | 
       | Yeovil is known for its historic market town center, RAF Museum
       | Cosford (nearby), and as a significant industrial town,
       | particularly during World War II for aircraft manufacturing
       | (including the Wellington bomber). It sits in thePen Di De
       | valley of the River Yeo.
        
       | ngl999 wrote:
       | It's censored and it'll spread certain kind of narrative all over
       | the world.
        
         | MrDrMcCoy wrote:
         | If you're using AI for narratives, you're using it wrong.
        
       | imagetic wrote:
       | It's the first model I've used that makes me forget it isn't one
       | of the big frontier players after the first prompt. So far I'm
       | impressed.
        
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