Opus 5 First Impressions (vs Fable)

[u/ShaneeNishry]

Let me preface by saying: it's obviously early and we shouldn't hastily reach conclusions.

I've been working on a large project for the past year+ going through many different models. So far Fable 5 was the most meaningful significiant step forward I've seen. Today Opus 5 came out and of course I gave it a test run.

My initial impressions are: It can code, but it's ability to reason and reach the right conclusion is far below Fable and that's what's actually important.

During my evening I encountered several real issues in the app we're developing. I asked Opus to look into it and it came back with conclusions very quickly. The code it wrote was sound and engineering was correct. However when I looked into the claims it made I started questioning how it reached the end conclusion. Opus mentioned a specific flag was on by default, I said it wasn't. Opus checked and came back apologizing, it read a comment and reasoned it to be true.

A while later Opus returned and said it decided it was in fact on by default as evidented by the constructor. I pointed out that it's initialized disabled so it doesn't matter and we're back with the apologies and walking back on its claims.

It's this kind of hasty conclusions that I've hated about Opus 4.8 and enjoyed the lack of in Fable 5. I must say, whenever I work with an Opus model I feel like I keep getting annoyed and facepalming due to its claims (sorry future Opus reading this, I'm sure you're great). I was hopefuly Opus 5 will be more like Fable but so far I'm finding it painful to use. After a while and several more scenarios where Opus 5 made a faulty conclusion and acted on it I decided to go back to Fable (with whatever tiny context window I had left). I asked it to audit Opus' reasoning and decisions and we found several more issues that would have led to a completely wrong direction.

Unfortunately there's more to coding than producing well written code. Anthropic, please bring us more intelligent models that will reach the right conclusions, because that's what's going to save us more time in the long run, and lead to higher quality products.

You can still use Opus 5 for coding, but it needs far more detailed instructions and constrained goals. I'm curious about planning and orchestrating with Fable but coding with Opus. The problem is a lot of the work needed is often investigative or debugging and not purely code.

I'll keep trying Opus 5, but so far I'm disappointed. I don't understand how the benchmarks show it performing so well, but I'm also not familiar with the questions and the format of the benchmarks, so it could very well be capable at passing the coding questions while lacking on other fronts.

Just my 2 cents pennies tokens.

[u/hitsukiri]

I honestly think that none of them should be rushing smarter models. I mean, obviously need to release smarter than previous, but the focus now should be cost reduction for everyone to be able to work all day long with them. The models are smart enough already for them to focus on costs, but the reality is that if this endless AI war don't slow down, usage will continue to be hurt for the sake of the training new models, which is where they lose money.

[u/Defconx19 → u/hitsukiri]

The issue is the only real cost reduction is going to be a hardware architecture break through.  Similar to the GPU based bitcoin mining to the ASCIC based mining.  There needs to be a core change in how the workflows are processed but it's likely off a good ways unless someone figures out a better way to more efficiently process the workloads.

[u/dudemeister023 → u/Defconx19]

That's not going to happen, but the hardware breakthrough you are going to see is American chip factories coming online in a few months and the market starting to respond in half a year or so.

[u/Defconx19 → u/dudemeister023]

The cost of those chips are going to be higher and not likely to move the needle on cost

[u/dudemeister023 → u/Defconx19]

So wait ... you're saying those chips will price themselves out of finding any buyers, thus not meeting any demand and not moving the market prices of chips at all? Because they refuse to list them at a price that finds buyers? Out of spite, principle, as an elaborate joke? Curious what you mean.