You've got to think the comments about "good enough" are people who have not yet tried Opus 5.5. I haven't been this struck by a step change since 4.5/4.6. It's a bigger jump even than when Fable first arrived.

As for Mistral - I got really excited when they said Large 4 was focusing on being #1 in cybersecurity, because that's somewhere that they genuinely could edge out Anthropic & OpenAI. Have it actually solve problems, instead of Anthropic flagging "you tried to find a null pointer exception bug in your own code, we're now reporting you to the US government". But on the Mistral benchmarks I'm seeing, this looks very disappointing, but at least they haven't entirely given up. I genuinely thought Mistral had given up on new general models. They need to learn the bitter lesson all over again.

No it is not. Only maybe for the noobs or vibe coders.

People who aren't afraid of rolling their sleeves into any code base? The difference is practically zero.

Please, give it another 6 months and they catch up. The American labs are currently trying everything they can to block others instead of advancing their models, trying to build an artificial moat. The American models are not that great, they are good, and they have a lot of agentic workflows in the back, but its basically a hardware limitation at this point. Once the HW makers catch up, and we can move away from the Nvidia monopoly, things will speed up quite a lot IMO.

I agree that Opus and GPT are almsot surely better, but so many real users are nervous enough about giving Anthropic and OpenAI access to all of their internal information that they may be willing to stomach worse models if it gives them more security.

The real question is if this model is good enough that it can still accelerate work, and not be a hindrance to real work like older Mistral models often were.

If they can do that, they'll have customers.

People say this exact thing every single time a new frontier model comes out.

I use Opus 5.5 at work.

I use MiMov2.6Pro, DeepSeekv4.1Flash, GLM5.3, Hy4, Qwen3.8 and KimiK3 at home. Opus5.5 is not a game changer.

It's an improvement, but game changer might be a bit of a stretch. If I lost access to Anthropic or OpenAI models tomorrow, I would be annoyed, but would reach for a slightly inferior model. Last year I wouldnt be able to say the same, and rhe challenge is that the moat is drying up fast. Whether its general improvements in model training by other competitors, or straight up distillation of SOTA models, the moat is shrinking and the available capital and spend for American model providers is going to dry up quickly as competing good enough models are adopted by more consumers.

It's especially the case as more non-Americans look to self hosted models and domestic cloud inference providers using open models that the US providers who are still leading the charge need to drastically drop their prices and find a path to profitability in order to maintain their lead and retain the advantage they had as AI turns into a commodity (which is happening faster than I think even the frontier labs initially predicted).

Let me know when the game changes are more than a month apart.

> X is such a game changer

I hear this literally every other week about whatever the newest FoTM model is.

Unless you can provide concrete examples of things you can do with them that you simply couldn't do with last week's model, it's absolutely meaningless.

Less and less work requires a frontier model though.

My todo app generator does not need opus 5.5

Yeah, I agree with this. I think the "the models are good enough" narrative is a myth. I've heard it so many times over the last year, but the model number keeps changing...

There is no ceiling on what you can accomplish with more intelligence, so there will always be a market for the best models, and that market is likely to just keep growing. If Opus 13.5 can one-shot a profitable company or discover a new disease treatment or whatever you can think of that a swarm of relentless super-geniuses could accomplish, companies (and governments) will throw money at it.

I also think there will always be a market for many sub-frontier models that will continue to grow rapidly as well, because "good enough" is definitely a thing for a given task.

Despite Opus 5.5 got really bad the last days for me. Looks like they nerfed it again. This is extremely unreliable.