alt Hacker NewsBenchmarks suggests they are comparable: https://artificialanalysis.ai/?models=claude-opus-4-6-adapti...
But let's say for the sake of discussion Opus is much better - still doesn't justify the price disparity especially when considering that other models are provided by commercial inference providers and anthropics is inhouse.
Replies
> Benchmarks suggests they are comparable
The problem here is people think AI benchmarks are analogous to say, CPU performance benchmarks. They're not:
* You can't control all the variables, only one (the prompt).
* The outputs, BY DESIGN, can fluctuate wildly for no apparent reason (i.e., first run, utter failure, second run, success).
* The biggest point, once a benchmark is known, future iterations of the model will be trained on it.
Trying to objectively measure model performance is a fool's errand.
Try doing real work with them, it's night and day difference especially for systems programming. The non-frontier models to a lot of benchmaxxing to look good.