alt Hacker NewsAnthropic models haven't been far ahead for a while. Quite a few months at least. Chinese models are roughly equal at 1/6th the cost. Minimax is roughly equal to Opus. Chinese providers also haven't had the issues with uptime and variable model quality. The gap with OpenAI also isn't huge and GLM is a noticeably more compliant model (unsurprisingly given the hubristic internal culture at Anthropic around safety).
CC is a better implementation and seems to be fairly economic with token usage. That is the really the only defining point and, I suspect, Anthropic are going to have a lot of trouble staying relevant with all the product issues.
They were far ahead for a brief period in November/December which is driving the hype cycle that now appears to be collapsing the company.
You have to test at least every month, things are moving quickly. Stepfun is releasing soon and seems to have an Opus-level model with more efficient architecture.
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> CC is a better implementation and seems to be fairly economic with token usage. That is the really the only defining point and, I suspect, Anthropic are going to have a lot of trouble staying relevant with all the product issues.
What are you using to drive the Chinese models in order to evaluate this? OpenCode?
Some of Claude Code's features, like remote sessions, are far more important than the underlying model for my productivity.
Claude is exceptionally better at long running agentic sessions.
I keep coming back to it because I can run it as a manager for the smaller tasks.
Minimax is nowhere near Opus in my tests, though for me at least oddly 4.6 felt worse than 4.5. I haven't use Minimax extensively, but I have an API driven test suite for a product and even Sonnet 4.6 outperforms it in my testing unless something changed in the last month.
One example is I have a multi-stage distillation/knowledge extraction script for taking a Discord channel and answering questions. I have a hardcoded 5k message test set where I set up 20 questions myself based on analyzing it.
In my harness Minimax wasn't even getting half of them right, whereas Sonnet was 100%. Granted this isn't code, but my usage on pi felt about the same.