As an aside: I lack the vocabulary, but man those interactive "stats" cards scream LLM-written to me. No problem with it, necessarily, just something about that style seems to raise a flag in my mind.
The $200 plan is explicitly 4x the $100 plan[1] only for "per session". That's so vague. I initially pushed back against your claim, but reading now Anthropic is not at all clear, in fact.
I wonder if releasing this may have been on the roadmap, but been prioritized as a bit of whiplash following the "you forfeit the entirety of your working directory as a condition of working with this tool" upset from a few days ago.
I agree to an extent but it needs to be balanced. Receiving a half-baked, extremely verbose recap of thinking on benign details with Opus 4.8 or GPT 5.5 feels like an extraordinary loss of quality of experience compared with fable 5.
Yes it shares less, but I think the trade-off is you pay less in tokens and hopefully it's truly just not needing to say things because it truly does just better get what you're saying, think to read X markdown file or GH issue which contains the info, etc.
As long as I can still push back and get it to share its thinking on demand and I'm confident the model isn't actually basing things on poor premises, this is okay for me. I am more productive when not inundated with time-wasting check-ins.
That said, I absolutely lament the loss of the ability to access the thinking - I would happily read the "DANGER DANGER DANGER" internal gremlin thoughts fable 5 makes to verify something if they were accessed, and prefer that to a recap presented only for my benefit.
Not to single you out, parent commenter, but I really hope the quality of discourse on HN will move past these basic comparisons eventually. It seems like every thread on every model release has the exact same comments.
"Wow, X models is Y% better or worse than Claude Z model on T benchmark"
"That's irrelevant, they're just benchmaxing."
"Not useable for daily coding or agentic workloads, the vibes are totally wrong."
"It's almost as good, and costs a lot less, so I will absolutely use it."
"I cannot imagine justifying using these, as the step change means open models lower costs do not make up for the productivity loss"
I'm an unhappy Anthropic customer and really rooting for open models and non-gatekept intelligence, but how do we move on from this now meme-like model release discourse rigamarole. I do not know what that would be. I don't design LLMs nor benchmarks, and I genuinely appreciate that people do their best to provide information, even if non-perfect here. I'm sure most of you who actively read these comment pages on announcements must feel similarly, though, right?
Genuine question though, why would I care about this if I'm paying for a subscription and adhering to TOS. I'm very skeptical about their privacy policy, business practices, and so on, but am curious what the negative about this is. Seems like it would work to my favour as a customer pushing back any date of the cutting of subsidies.
That said, these fraudulent proxies are helping Chinese labs keep up, which might be to my advantage long term in eventually having a high quality private AI I fully control on my own hardware. That's not support, but I do recognize the incentive, for whatever that's worth.
There's a large gap between what they do (same env var disables this since the beginning) vs Microsoft bucking it's way through AI coauthorship credit in a multi potential author china shop, though.
In what way is it "not a special bug"? It's a publicly known root access from RCE exploit. Those cannot be a dime a dozen. I'm sure it's especially interesting for any shared hosting services which might be affected, and could be delayed. I could find any places running containered services and exfiltrate secrets parallel services, no?
What constitutes "special" for you, out of curiosity? Something chaining with a hypervisor exploit?
I bet the decision had been made many months before. If they had started operations already they would have needed to invest probably millions in the equipment purchase, worker training, and so on. IIRC I had asked my prof and he didn't seem to be interested in investing the effort into presenting our findings, but never really elaborated further.
Kind of fun thinking back, but hopefully they weren't betting the farm solely on some university professor's at-his-pace work.
In my undergrad I did a grad course on advanced mine ventilation, modeling the fluid dynamics of clearing out blast gasses from a room and pillar salt mine in Southern Ontario. The company had reached out to the professor a year or two ago asking for help understanding why it took so long for blast gasses to clear (which is obviously something to minimize). I was pretty proud I was able to reproduce the measured air velocities with my model, but while preparing my presentation at the end of the semester, I read the a month before I started my project the mine had switched to road headers (mechanical rock breaking, appropriate only in soft rock mines like salt, potash, and coal) and so my research, while interesting, seemed a little pointless.
They have some really unique challenges in salt mines, for those who enjoy reading into it. "Les Îles de la Madelaine" in the St. Lawrence seaway is a kitesurfing destination with an absolutely incredible salt mine, for anyone curious[1].
I'm a native English speaker who became fluent in (québecois) french as an adult, I could not agree more. I have a better chance knowing how to pronounce a new word in french vs. English.
Doesn't mean there aren't exceptions, but it's staggering how internally inconsistently English is.For example "read" and it's famous past tense, differently pronounced "read".
Still, we've got a couple fun ones au Québec, like betterave "bet-rav" caught me off guard or gruau "gree-au".
I built a suite of cli tools my last rotation at work for this exact reason. Made a contacts database using recutils with a go cli wrapper, used vikunja for Todo (with a cli wrapper from someone else), have all knowledge stored in a Johnny decimal folder structure with markdown summaries, and an automated typst document creation pipeline cli to blast out reports and posters and stuff, among a couple others. I basically did my job via terminal with agents after investing a couple days getting it set up, paid off very quickly.