alt Hacker News3x price drop almost certainly means Opus 4.5 is a different and smaller base model than Opus 4.1, with more fine tuning to target the benchmarks.
I'll be curious to see how performance compares to Opus 4.1 on the kind of tasks and metrics they're not explicitly targeting, e.g. eqbench.com
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ACCount37 • yesterday at 9:10 PM
Probably more sparse (MoE) than Opus 4.1. Which isn't a performance killer by itself, but is a major concern. Easy to get it wrong.
adgjlsfhk1 • yesterday at 8:27 PM
It seems plausible that it's a similar size model and that the 3x drop is just additional hardware efficiency/lowered margin.
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Why? They just closed a $13B funding round. Entirely possible that they're selling below-cost to gain marketshare; on their current usage the cloud computing costs shouldn't be too bad, while the benefits of showing continued growth on their frontier models is great. Hell, for all we know they may have priced Opus 4.1 above cost to show positive unit economics to investors, and then drop the price of Opus 4.5 to spur growth so their market position looks better at the next round of funding.