alt Hacker NewsHaiku 5.5 is noticeably smarter than GPT-6 Luna, so I can see their pricing strategy here.
For a while Anthropic has lacked a cost effective “cheap” LLM for summarisation, compacting, RAG helpers, etc.
These ‘ephemeral’ workloads are often under 100k tokens, or can be structured to be under 100k.
In some coding benchmarks, Haiku 5.5 beats Sonnet 5! (Especially implementation; do a well defined Jira ticket; etc), it’s really impressive how much intelligence per dollar has grown in just a few short months.
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noticeably smarter remains to be seen in practice. For now, Haiku is a bit more expensive than Luna on < 100k token, but I just don't have any agentic work below 100k, so this is going to be 5x more expensive than shown on these charts. It's hardly competitive ...
> it’s really impressive how much intelligence per dollar has grown in just a few short months.
Open weights models giving a distant salute from afar
The benchmarks are very long form logic, knowledge, and coding tasks though. I'm very interested in Haiku 5.5's performance on ObviousBench where Luna 6 is currently SotA.
I said this in another comment, but Artificial Analysis has the cost per task of Haiku on max roughly equal to that of Sol on medium, and the latter is significantly more intelligent. (And I'd wager that Sol probably finishes tasks more quickly, even with Haiku inference being faster.) So Haiku really only makes sense on lower reasoning levels, and only if you care about intelligence and speed more than you do about cost effectiveness (where Luna currently dominates). And that's without even bringing Chinese models into the mix.