Since they're opening it publicly on irc here, the safety rails might be a consideration. I've made an agent recently and that's why I'm paying a premium to Anthropic atm -- Though I'm still experimenting to see if it's really necessary.

It's getting some organic usage -- 100M input tokens for just chats this month -- and I've seen enough users try to throw Haiku against the wall and failing to trick it into misbehaving. It "pumps the breaks" a lot and imitates annoyance when you ask it repeatedly :) Handles emotionally driven real-life questions mid-conversation well. It just works.

Not seeing all that consistently with other models I've tried so far -- but I've assumed it's not a completely fair comparison with (e.g.) open weights, since these safety rails are presumably not always arising from the natural model calls.