Comment by verdverm
19 hours ago
The argument is not that they are as good, but that more models have reached the threshold for being useful. You do not need the best for most tasks these days. Freedom from closed model vendors also has value.
This is why token prices are falling and there are expectations for commoditization. In another year or two, you will have Opus 5.5 in much smaller models, assuming capability distillation remains as good as it has been from mega -> mini models.
Yeah I get it but I don't think it hurts Anthropic sub offerings. 200$ or 500$ or whatever it's going to be is low enough that even slight edge is worth paying for business use case. They will likely go into local proprietary models as well (we train our model on your data and you run it on your premises so you meet data retention regulation).
While I am a big fan of open models and I hope I can run local Opus 5.5 level model locally in the future I will still be using Opus 7.5 or whatever it's going to be for anything business related then. Again, the problem here is that they are not making enough from those subs and API is 20x+ more expensive.