Comment by WhitneyLand
8 days ago
The frontier labs commonly trade spots at the top of the benchmarks with each new model release.
The timing of these price cut discussions says to me OpenAI has no imminent release that will be edging out Mythos/Fable.
If so the question becomes when can they do so, or is this possibly a turning point where Anthropic keeps the crown to themselves for the foreseeable future.
At the right price, these model don't need to be the best, good enough will do. I think we're fast approaching good enough for most users.
This. Here's a quick experiment I did yesterday.
I got a new $20 Claude subscription to try the new Fable model. I gave it a single prompt, and it barely finished, using up my whole session quota (it was at ~95% when it finished) and 10% of my weekly quota.
For comparison, with the Kimi Code $40 subscription I can pretty much constantly run two/three agents in parallel for the whole week, and I never run out of quota. I can blindly throw it at anything and everything without worrying about hitting the limits. (And it's not exactly a cheap model to run -- it has 1 trillion parameters!)
Is Kimi as good as Claude? Of course not. But you don't need the absolute state-of-art for most things. If I don't have exceptionally difficult tasks it makes no sense to use it. Just throw Kimi at it, and even if it needs to run 2 or 3 times longer in the background I don't care, because I'm not running out of tokens there.
A word of caution on this.
I've tried this too, and was disappointed.
Kimi generally benchmarks at "a bit more intelligent than Sonnet Medium" levels[1] and I'd agree broadly with this assessment.
If you have adapted your coding to rely on the agentic style that is doable in Opus 4.7+ then you will find Kimi disappointing.
If you are using it in a more targeted way then it can work well.
[1] https://artificialanalysis.ai/agents/coding-agents?agents=cl...
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> This. Here's a quick experiment I did yesterday.
It's like running a sports car and then complaining it burns through petrol too fast.
The truth is the model while impressive is not needed for much of what people need.
Local models can do the work and just offload heavy lifting to the cloud models.
Not only that, it's easy to let ethics steer my choice as well. And at this point I suspect OpenAI will never earn my respect.
I find it is a quite reliable workflow to ask a strong model to design a plan and then point a weaker one at executing. The agent harnesses themselves are baking in similar concepts though.
Yeah, that's how I feel too. I am totally fine with xHigh GPT 5.5 when it comes to coding.
agreed, unlimited gpt5.5 fast is sufficient for 90% of my use cases. Tried Fable, nice to have but we don't really need it.
OTOH, using the best is a competitive advantage when time = money. It's like giving your engineers a slow laptop because it's cheaper. It may be cheaper but not worth the cost.
Unless your job is purely producing code pointlessly, this is not a really good comparison. Most of the time really is spent on understanding the problem and figuring out solutions, not waiting on CPU.
> OTOH, using the best is a competitive advantage when time = money. It's like giving your engineers a slow laptop because it's cheaper. It may be cheaper but not worth the cost.
That doesn't imply giving your devs the best laptop makes any difference.
How much more productive will your devs be if you upgrade them from a 32GB RAM, 8-core laptop to a 768GB RAM 96-core threadripper?
In your analogy, Kimi may not be the 4-core celeron with 4GB of RAM, it's more like the 8-core AMD with 32GB of RAM.
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Not necessarily, inference speed also has huge time aspect. For example anthropic takes nearly twice as long as OpenAI models for my tasks with both having similar success rates.
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It seems that OpenAI lacks a clear target audience, they try to be everything for everyone. Anthropic is targeting professionals / enterprise users.
I don’t fully understand why OpenAI lacks this focus, as clearly identifying a target market is one of the first things you do with a business strategy. But instead they just seem to throw stuff against the wall and see what sticks.
I think this is too simplistic. Codex is increasingly useful for business usage. I use it for both technical stuff and doing non technical things with my inbox, google drive, etc. It's pretty good for that. And it's pretty clear that business users are very much untapped potential at this point. They need proper agents with tunable guard rails and all the rest.
It seems very competent at coding tasks as well. I don't think Anthropic has a huge edge on that front. It's more of a neck and neck race with proponents in both camps. I ignore most benchmarks at this point; I don't think they have much relevance for normal users.
I think it's actually necessary for both to try out different approaches. Nothing is set in stone yet when it comes to the UX of these things.
> I don’t fully understand why OpenAI lacks this focus, as clearly identifying a target market is one of the first things you do with a business strategy
Resource curse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
I've been inside companies that have struggled with this, and the real internal story goes like this:
Tl;dr - Don't trust promotions made during the good times. Continuously reevaluate leaders.
They have the consumer market but want the enterprise market, because it's a lot more lucrative, so they're probably going to just keep chasing that even though there's no signs they'll stop losing to Anthropic. They don't need to do that much to keep the consumer market because of momentum.
Questionable whether the enterprise market really is the most lucrative. The biggest of big tech all have significant revenue from the consumer market. Compare Apple, Google, Meta, to IBM, Salesforce, ServiceNow.
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OpenAI actually never had a focus. Their VC pith was: once the AI is good enough, it will find our business model. They've raised money on that.
With that said you are right, it seems OpenAI got numbed by ChatGPT's initial success and tried to be the go-to brand for consumers... which is Google's playground.
Meanwhile, Anthropic led the B2B market with a clever segmented approach, and got well-paying customers.
Because they gained a HUGE amount of “normal” users and I think they feel desperate to monetise that. It’s their potential massive edge on competition, they just haven’t found any way to realise it and I suspect they won’t.
They keep asking chatgpt how to monetize and it keeps giving slop answers?
> The timing of these price cut discussions says to me OpenAI has no imminent release that will be edging out Mythos/Fable.
Initially I had the same thought but I think this might actually have more to do with Fable being removed from the Claude subscription later this month. At that point it becomes cost prohibitive to use for most tasks anyways & this is the perfect opportunity to compete on price, especially given enterprise customers are already looking to improve spend management
The benchmark is not everything, the LLMs have their “personality” and GPT is annoying AF.
Also, I don’t about others, but I personally strongly dislike OpenAI’s leadership’s hypocrisy. I find them losing the race highly satisfying.
> If so the question becomes when can they do so, or is this possibly a turning point where Anthropic keeps the crown to themselves for the foreseeable future.
This specific crown (Best Performing Model) appears to be made out of thorns: pay 100x more for maybe a 10% improvement in capabilities.
Not sure what the goal is, here.
It's simple I think - over time the price will go down. According to some analyses the price for equal intelligence declined 10-1000x per year, depending on the domain.
It probably won't be the same again but I still think we can bet on radically cheaper Mythos level intelligence in the future.
I don’t think Mythos/Fable matter in attracting customers. The typical use is not going to be on the most expensive model, especially with all its frustrating gotchas like refusing harmless prompts and forcing companies to have their data retained.
If OpenAI can offer an alternative to Opus but with better pricing, it will boost their revenue at Anthropic’s cost, in time for the IPO.