Comment by verdverm
21 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.
Business do not get subscription plans as they are largely not available, certainly Anthropic is not offering them under the contractual obligations businesses want. It's all per-token.
Then you have to consider automations and user facing products. A quota based subscription is not enough or risks being shut off after too many tokens are used. These are the primary places open weights are disrupting closed, expensive models.
Eventually, token vendors will be commoditized and the average user will have an effectively unlimited plan, but we are not there yet.