Comment by hodgehog11
12 hours ago
I think this is an unfortunate reality that many miss. For simple and procedural tasks, yes, there are awesome alternatives. DeepSeek 4.1 Flash 1017 is my favourite by far. But for the headlining complex applications, and for consistently reliable reviewing, the gap is genuinely so remarkably far that it is hard to imagine having any alternative in the near future. The closest is the (very expensive) Kimi K3.1 Pro, which is, in my experience, roughly where Anthropic and OpenAI were near the start of the year. DeepSeek is a year behind in this domain. All open models have still yet to cross that monumental improvement that happened around Fable / Sol mid-year.
Because rigour is typically tied to math performance, my own experience has closely matched the FrontierMath Tier 4 benchmark. That should give you an idea of the difference.
Do you really need Fable level 99% of people don't need to solve 600 year old math problems. People use the best model available because they are scared a cheaper model won't be as good but in the end it rarely matters for 99 percentile of coding.
It's FOMO and the never ending treadmill.
The newest model has people go "oh I thought models sucked until THIS one came out." Then when some other company makes a cheaper model that is comparable to it people go "nah this model sucks who would use it over Claude/Openai? Noone can beat them at all because look at this one shot"
Bad decisions compound over time, so I want my model making as few of them as possible. Opus 5.5 is the current GOAT, and it's fairly affordable on a subscription. (I wish it was cheaper, but nothing else delivers comparable results for my price/time investment.)