The frontier labs commonly trade spots at the top of the benchmarks with each new model release.

The timing of these price cut discussions says to me OpenAI has no imminent release that will be edging out Mythos/Fable.

If so the question becomes when can they do so, or is this possibly a turning point where Anthropic keeps the crown to themselves for the foreseeable future.

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mattjoyce 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

At the right price, these model don't need to be the best, good enough will do. I think we're fast approaching good enough for most users.

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kouteiheika 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This. Here's a quick experiment I did yesterday.

I got a new $20 Claude subscription to try the new Fable model. I gave it a single prompt, and it barely finished, using up my whole session quota (it was at ~95% when it finished) and 10% of my weekly quota.

For comparison, with the Kimi Code $40 subscription I can pretty much constantly run two/three agents in parallel for the whole week, and I never run out of quota. I can blindly throw it at anything and everything without worrying about hitting the limits. (And it's not exactly a cheap model to run -- it has 1 trillion parameters!)

Is Kimi as good as Claude? Of course not. But you don't need the absolute state-of-art for most things. If I don't have exceptionally difficult tasks it makes no sense to use it. Just throw Kimi at it, and even if it needs to run 2 or 3 times longer in the background I don't care, because I'm not running out of tokens there.

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nl 2 hours ago | parent [-]

A word of caution on this.

I've tried this too, and was disappointed.

Kimi generally benchmarks at "a bit more intelligent than Sonnet Medium" levels[1] and I'd agree broadly with this assessment.

If you have adapted your coding to rely on the agentic style that is doable in Opus 4.7+ then you will find Kimi disappointing.

If you are using it in a more targeted way then it can work well.

[1] https://artificialanalysis.ai/agents/coding-agents?agents=cl...

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kouteiheika 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes, I would agree with this.

I think it works best when you're using the agent in a more hands-on way with a targeted prompt. If you're obsessive about code quality like I am (so you thoroughly review and, when needed, reprompt or even rewrite what the agent does) then you'll be fine, but if you like to just throw a prompt at the wall and expect it to plan and execute the whole thing perfectly then you'll be disappointed.

A middle-ground trick one can use is to have Opus (or Fable now) plan the whole thing and get something cheaper like Kimi execute on it.

	▲	rented_mule 42 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		CodeWhale (formerly deepseek-tui) automates this over DeepSeek V4 Flash and Pro. My shallow understanding is that it prompts the model to evaluate the complexity of a given task, then decides on Flash vs. Pro at various reasoning levels for that task. This can help with both cost and speed. If other agent platforms don't already do this, I have to imagine they will at some point. I'm retired and can't justify spending too much on these things. CodeWhale over DeepSeek is helping me understand this space much better (and have some fun!), and it's quite affordable. I've spent ~30 hours using it over the last couple of weeks, and I've spent $3.89 on DeepSeek in that time. If I don't feel like writing any code for a few weeks, I pay nothing. Looking at DeepSeek's dashboard, about 60% of my requests have gone to Pro and 40% to Flash. I've used 97M Pro tokens and 19M Flash tokens (well over 90% of each have been cache hits, so the price is much lower than it would otherwise be).

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boc 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

OTOH, using the best is a competitive advantage when time = money. It's like giving your engineers a slow laptop because it's cheaper. It may be cheaper but not worth the cost.

	▲	lelanthran 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> OTOH, using the best is a competitive advantage when time = money. It's like giving your engineers a slow laptop because it's cheaper. It may be cheaper but not worth the cost. That doesn't imply giving your devs the best laptop makes any difference. How much more productive will your devs be if you upgrade them from a 32GB RAM, 8-core laptop to a 768GB RAM 96-core threadripper? In your analogy, Kimi may not be the 4-core celeron with 4GB of RAM, it's more like the 8-core AMD with 32GB of RAM.
	▲	bushbaba 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Not necessarily, inference speed also has huge time aspect. For example anthropic takes nearly twice as long as OpenAI models for my tasks with both having similar success rates.

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stingraycharles 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It seems that OpenAI lacks a clear target audience, they try to be everything for everyone. Anthropic is targeting professionals / enterprise users.

I don’t fully understand why OpenAI lacks this focus, as clearly identifying a target market is one of the first things you do with a business strategy. But instead they just seem to throw stuff against the wall and see what sticks.

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jillesvangurp 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think this is too simplistic. Codex is increasingly useful for business usage. I use it for both technical stuff and doing non technical things with my inbox, google drive, etc. It's pretty good for that. And it's pretty clear that business users are very much untapped potential at this point. They need proper agents with tunable guard rails and all the rest.

It seems very competent at coding tasks as well. I don't think Anthropic has a huge edge on that front. It's more of a neck and neck race with proponents in both camps. I ignore most benchmarks at this point; I don't think they have much relevance for normal users.

I think it's actually necessary for both to try out different approaches. Nothing is set in stone yet when it comes to the UX of these things.

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harrouet 37 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

OpenAI actually never had a focus. Their VC pith was: once the AI is good enough, it will find our business model. They've raised money on that.

With that said you are right, it seems OpenAI got numbed by ChatGPT's initial success and tried to be the go-to brand for consumers... which is Google's playground.

Meanwhile, Anthropic led the B2B market with a clever segmented approach, and got well-paying customers.

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broodbucket 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They have the consumer market but want the enterprise market, because it's a lot more lucrative, so they're probably going to just keep chasing that even though there's no signs they'll stop losing to Anthropic. They don't need to do that much to keep the consumer market because of momentum.

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ralph84 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Questionable whether the enterprise market really is the most lucrative. The biggest of big tech all have significant revenue from the consumer market. Compare Apple, Google, Meta, to IBM, Salesforce, ServiceNow.

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broodbucket 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Enterprise market is paying by token and using a lot of tokens. Consumer market is paying a subscription that they can't raise too high or they'll lose users to competition. Seems to me that the enterprise market scales a lot higher.

	▲	byzantinegene 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		it's really not much compared to the amount they are spending on training. 100 developers at $200 per month is just $20000
	▲	skeptic_ai 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Have you seen many corporations complaining and caping usage to 20-200usd per developer per month. I doubt will change much. Many are considering on premise now.

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mynegation 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Apple, sure. But Google and Meta are really advertising companies, whose income stream comes from enterprises, big and small.

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kennywinker 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

They keep asking chatgpt how to monetize and it keeps giving slop answers?

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lelanthran 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> If so the question becomes when can they do so, or is this possibly a turning point where Anthropic keeps the crown to themselves for the foreseeable future.

This specific crown (Best Performing Model) appears to be made out of thorns: pay 100x more for maybe a 10% improvement in capabilities.

Not sure what the goal is, here.

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3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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SilverElfin 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don’t think Mythos/Fable matter in attracting customers. The typical use is not going to be on the most expensive model, especially with all its frustrating gotchas like refusing harmless prompts and forcing companies to have their data retained.

If OpenAI can offer an alternative to Opus but with better pricing, it will boost their revenue at Anthropic’s cost, in time for the IPO.

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d--b 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The benchmark is not everything, the LLMs have their “personality” and GPT is annoying AF.

Also, I don’t about others, but I personally strongly dislike OpenAI’s leadership’s hypocrisy. I find them losing the race highly satisfying.