"Users will find Opus 4.8 to be a modest but tangible improvement on its predecessor."

This is a refreshing attitude!

I've also verified that you can now turn off adaptive thinking in the web UI, which is great. I've had a lot of problems with thinking not triggering and the model producing sub-par output. Glad we can finally turn it off. (I hope being able to turn off adaptive thinking is new, if I could have turned it off at any time that would be embarrassing)

I’m pretty sure that switch has always been there, but turning it off doesn’t do what you want. It disables thinking entirely.

It is refreshing but perhaps actually not warranted this time?

I mostly study web research, and Opus 4.7 was a regression on BrowseComp compared to Opus 4.6, which has been born out by my usage.

Opus 4.8 is now much better than either 4.7 or 4.6, and having it search the web is one of the primary use cases of chatbots.

Are they doing these smaller releases to attune users to a more incremental cycle of updates? Like, yeah other model providers do these major updates every x months, we on the other hand do incremental updates every x/2 months

Awesome, thanks for posting because I think I hit a possibly-spurious bug in turning Adaptive off when I switched models (4.6 -> 4.8, extra). Tried again, works as intended (I hope).

More importantly for me, though, is how CC will respond to 4.6-"only" flags for thinking. For now, it doesn't seem to clobber my setup.

I was hoping that the web UI would be better -- I like Anthropic better than OpenAI from a values perspective and want to use their products, but ChatGPT in thinking mode has been just vastly better than claude.ai.So my fingers were crossed that these changes would bring it up to par.

But trying it out... alas, no. Simple factual questions where ChatGPT would go do a quick search and get the facts and report them back to me, get a "Great question! [totally invented bullshit]" from Claude, even with this new model and thinking set to high. I have to explicitly tell it to search to get it to look up basic facts, rather than it recognizing that it needs to do that, like GPT does.

The benchmark improvements actually look pretty damn nice tho!

> This is a refreshing attitude!

Well, I think the attitude is that costs are allowed to escalate faster and more steeply than the features delivered. From that perspective, semantic versioning is a handy tool for adjusting pricing strategies. IMHO, it (versioning) only makes sense for open-source projects, where you can clearly see the actual changes made with each version upgrade. Anything else is more than a little suspicious…

"We've cut our costs A LOT"

What's refreshing about it given the context that 4.7 was a regression in many ways (including as measured by benchmarks)?

4.8 is also 2x more expensive for a "modest" performance bump. How refreshing.

This is just cope.

I liked the "modest but tangible improvement" too! There is a cynical take here but I think I'm gonna hold it in...

What do you mean? This is not just a new model, this is a new way of thinking.