The output tokens per task just exploded. From 118k tokens (46k Answer/71k Reasoning) in 5.1 to 274k tokens (81k Answer/192k Reasoning) in 5.2.
Notably, in order to achieve a specific quality, the model has to "reason" for every prompt proportional to the training inference.
This is arguably the case of diminishing returns being reached, as answer token prices saturate the willingness of customers to pay.
They've run into a wall.
An economically successful step would be to improve training cost/frontier advance.
They essentially failed at that, assuming they kept their training costs for the model step at least constant.
If you leave xhigh and max off.. you still get better performance than Opus 5.5 max
Opus 5.5 Max - score 59 - cost per task - $10.04
Fable 5.2 High - score 62 - cost per task - $9.08
Notable takeaways:
- Sol-low - cost-competitive with Haiku, while outperforming Sonnet on medium
- Sol-High - Competes with Astra medium and beats Opus 5.5-medium, at 20% the cost
- Sol-Max - Beats Opus 5.5 high, Astra high, and competes with Opus xhigh, at cheaper than Sonnet and a fraction of the Opus cost
And when you look at time spent, With the exception of Sol-max you get better results in less time for less money. My own experience is that this is true-- it is difficult to call Opus strictly better than Sol, but Sol gets where it's going far more efficiently.
It's rather hard to look at opus-- or any of anthropic's models-- and say "economical".
We would need to change how we compute. New chips. New architectures. Or maybe we reached the end of physics. Photonic compute is the last frontier. I don’t know.
This is a dataset basically constructed by taking a bunch of DeepSeek R1 trajectories and filtering out the incredibly long rambling ones: https://huggingface.co/datasets/open-thoughts/OpenThoughts-1...
There's also a bunch of RL research around strategies to coax the student model towards more concise trajectories.
In general, a lot of people in industry are finding cost savings these days by tuning a smaller model over longer agent trajectories (not exactly the same as distilling the reasoning traces, since those aren't exposed by many frontier labs anymore) collected from their production agents. Typically works best when you have a pretty workflow-y agent whose tasks all share a similar shape.
To do that you need a larger model to have many many branches to try.
And maybe that's how all of it is going to evolve in the future – so you pay per solution, not tokens?
Perhaps, it's a bit like being a super smart person in contemporary society: at some point, being smarter doesn't really reliably translate into a better life.
When you learn from available human data, those text books max out at some point. You cannot learn what isn't there.
And I am simply ignoring the ridiculous comments around local model usage from certain CEOs.
very cost competitive
Fable 5.2 low is 3x cheaper than Fable 5.1 xhigh while being 8% smarter.
https://artificialanalysis.ai/?releases=claude-fable-5-2%2Cc...
Fable 5.2 at high scores a 62, which is better than anything else on the market (except Fable 5.2 at xhigh and max) -- and is about a third of the price per task.
The thing is, all of these pointers are in the CLAUDE.md file, so it just ignored instructions because it thought it was smarter than the world and didn't need them. It feels really arrogant is how I would describe it.
I really don't get the value proposition of these massive models, seems like they're just loss leaders simply to say you're the in the top 3. There's not much use cases outside of niche academic research (and even then I question the need). They mostly function as marketing tools, like a casino that offers high roller accommodations.
People will say "cyber" but companies didnt want to spend on security before, not sure why they would all of a sudden be compelled to spend even more.
Security is mandatory now in a way that it wasn't, now that AI has eliminated the skill barrier to hacking.
I used to work on evals/observability at Opik: https://github.com/comet-ml/opik And I can say from working with lots of users running agents at scale, there is definitely a pretty commonly reached frontier of difficulty/complexity/abstraction where the capability difference between something like Fable/Astra and smaller models is a big deal. I find this to be especially true the more autonomous your workflow gets. You can still often tackle the hardest tasks with something like Opus, it just typically involves more direct intervention and design work from the user.
But again, this is just anecdata on my part. All of this is still pretty ambiguous and lots of companies are trying to solve the problem of matching models to task difficulty (I.e. routers), with varying degrees of success.
*Scale numbers to whatever suits you.
That's about all you can say for sure, especially about a topic that is so broad as to be virtually meaningless.
I'm curious to see the next generation of dedicated AI processors and how they perform.
Anthropic and OpenAI are expensive bleeding edge, but few use cases really need it.
few use cases really need it.
again, they can be great for narrow use cases, and save you a fortune.
The amount of compute it cost to get the best previous performance from anthropic went down. Nobody is putting a gun to your head and forcing you to go further down the paretto frontier if the current level of intelligence/task is acceptable to you.
Cheaper and faster than Opus(max) AND scored higher. But yeah let's doompost about it...
Booooooooooo!
Most people on plan use do NOT use up all their plan usage.
Users on API plans can still use Opus 5.5 which is a great model. If they want top of the line performance, they can pay more.
When another company puts out a model that undercuts Fable 5.2 on price at similar performance, Anthropic will put out Opus 6 and undercut them right back. That's how the wheel turns. This is just part of the cycle.
This might be true for a small portion of the user base, but it is not true as a statement of fact.
https://support.claude.com/en/articles/9266767-what-is-the-t...
> Team plans support up to 150 seats. If your organization is on the Team plan and needs more than 150 seats, you can upgrade to the Enterprise plan.
> Enterprise: Seat price + usage at API rates
> US$20/seat/month, billed annually, 20 seat minimum. Usage cost scales with model and task.
There is no premium seat option listed for the enterprise plan
I am always interested in this comparison since it shows how quickly you can go back and forth with a model, capturing both tokens/task and tokens/second. The new models seem to be meaningfully better here.
For example, the official provider for Kimi K3.1 Pro is dead last for speed on OpenRouter. You could run it more than 5x faster for the same cost elsewhere, which should push it comfortably into the pareto quadrant.
If you take the average point inside the 4 quadrants, the top left one is pareto optimal (of the 4)
Another member of the pro-REPL / anti-agentic tribe. There are dozens of us!
But perhaps the performance on real-world tasks will be more noticeable than on benchmarks.
Modern studio pictures that get nominated for best picture or best cinematography cost around $80 million on average. If you look at highest grossing films the budgets are closer to $175 million on average – even taking into account the $20 million budget of Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle.
Isn't it more that when you're spending that kind of money that $100k for the "best" thing becomes kind of like "insurance" where you don't want to be the one who doesn't use "the best" when "the best" costs about 0.1% of the picture's budget?
Additionally a studio can buy the $100,000 lens once and use it on many films. But it's not like you can reuse Fable 5.2 in the same way.
Edit: high seems better than max
I had to remind them 4.6 only came out February this year. In a normal world 4.6 is a newer model! A model 6 months old is seen as ancient!
That kid might indeed be a genius, clearly bright, but is more interested in deciding whether I should have asked a question than in answering it.
For me personally, if the best model on the planet refuses to answer why I shouldn't mix bleach and ammonia, where I'm trying to understand the chemistry behind the warning, it's not pareto frontier to one that atleast tries to and points me in a general direction. Being told that the topic is concerning, referred to someone else and charged part of my quota for that experience feels like getting an invoice from that school genius for telling me to "just ask the chemistry teacher".
If my LLM asks me to rethink my life when I ask it to reverse engineer the firmware of my Samsung TV that I suspect is setting up adhoc radio networks to relay my data to Samsung's cloud, I feel rather sad, specially when that kid sends me an invoice for saying "no"
At least Anthropic should not bill me for the refusal (as of my last tests, refusals still comes out of my quota) - getting slapped and pickpocketed for asking a question is really upsetting.
There's a setting to not degrade to a lower model on refusals and instead pause the chat.
Me: No, I'm away from the computer right now, you figure it out. Use the root login you already have if you can't figure it out.
Opus: This can wait until you get home, then.
Me: No, figure it out now or use root.
Got [cyber]'d, some scary message that referred me to legal/AUP, and refused to continue.
Switched to OpenAI in part due to this silliness. Sol seems a little less smart but doesn't get on a high horse to lecture you about this stuff. It either does the work or fails to do the work, and leaves the moralizing out of it. It was able to take over from where Claude left off and finish the project.
Max effort is nice for revealing the limits of a model, but it's almost never used in practice.
If you scroll down to the coding charts you can start adding Fable 5.2, Opus 5.5, and others at more normal difficulty settings.
Fable 5.2 on medium looks quite attractive compared to Opus 5.5 high/xhigh
Fable 5.2 on max (the default) looks like a good way to light your money on fire.
For an open source project (CrowdGPT) I hit upon this workflow in a recent PR:
DeepSeek v4 Flash 1017 made a draft plan
Google Gemini 4 Argon corrected the plan
DeepSeek v4 Flash 1017 did the first implementation
Google Gemini 4 Argon debugged the problems in that implementation
Kimi 2.7 Code did a code review and proposed minor fixes
DeepSeek v4 Flash 1017 performed the fixes
Google Gemini 4 Argon debugged one problem that I found in that fix.
I reviewed the plans and the resulting codePretty big Gemini fan - but IMO Argon is universally worse for coding than Astra or Opus 5.5 (un-nerfed).
I strongly prefer Gemini's output compared to anything else. So I typically use Argon to either direct other agents or explain something without psychobabble.
Argon/Carbon have by far the lowest hallucination rates, so IMO it serves as the best bullshit shield from other models.
In terms of implementation (and especially design), it's far behind Astra and Opus, and I'm sure Fable will make that gap even larger.
Argon/Carbon may give you not-the-best advice, but they are far less likely to just flat-out-and-completely lie to you.
It's not as smart for coding as Opus, but it's above the best open weights.
IME, YMMV, etc.
I am not sure how people keep saying google are not in the race, or have lost it or whatever when just a few hours ago they had the #1 model? What more do people want?
But Gemini models are still neck and neck in the lead both in my experience and in benchmarks, and Gemini is far above the competitors (although Opus 5.5 closed much of the gap) when it comes to any kind of complex web dev. (I generally use Astra for anything 3D, Gemini for anything web/mobile, and Opus for everything else.)
I learned not to put too much trust into benchmarks. The best benchmark is to use the model on a codebase you know well.
So, what more do I want? It'd be a good start to actually tell me it's available and giving me a clear path to using it via plan & harness?
well, releasing it would be nice
So certainly released to the unwashed masses like me to use for free without any special extra work or API keys.
Max should not be used unless you really need every bit of perf, it's deep into diminishing returns territory.
Change the models in the dropdown to medium / high and Fable 5.2 is about twice as cost efficient, and slightly faster.
Fable 5.2 medium for example seems a really good choice when it comes to the performance vs task (if you have a complex task that requires such a model of course).
Businesses like predictable costs and predictable performance.
If your new model is slightly better but crazy expensive, but doesn’t have to be with certain settings, but my user can accidentally run it that way by mistake or maybe your harness makes it the default by accident and the user doesn’t notice…
My beloved predictability is destroyed and trying to get users to understand this is useless.
Imagine a streaming subscription that worked like this: “We’ve updated our catalog with more movies. If you want the premium ones though you only get 2 per week and then you have to wait. But if you do mostly classics and a few from the 2010s you can squeeze in a recent theater release. If you time it right and do only one every day you can see 30 modern classics this month, but you can’t watch three today. Also your bill this month is $40 instead of $20 due to the library update”.