State of the Claudes

Some of my family members are business owners. They've been using ChatGPT to help them do their work but lately they've found it to be slow, unreliable, and forgetful. Now they're trying out Claude to see how it compares.

I'm a long-time Anthropic customer. Here's my take on the different Claude models and their capabilities.

Claude models come in different flavors, on a spectrum from small/fast/cheap/inaccurate to large/slow/expensive/(over)thinking.

In order: Haiku, Sonnet, Opus, Fable, Mythos

Each of these models has version numbers attached. First there were Haiku 3 and Sonnet 3, then Sonnet 3.5, then Sonnet 3.6, then Sonnet 4.0 and Opus 4.0… I think we're currently at 5.0 across the whole suite of models. It changes fast.

Haiku: dinky, cheap, good for very basic tasks. Useful for computer programs that need to do stuff like summarizing text or sentiment analysis. But not a good choice for a general-purpose chat. Makes a lot of mistakes.

Sonnet: fast and affordable. doesn't think too hard. my current favorite for all tasks. ✨

Opus: expensive and supposedly smart. Opus was the best model on the market around versions 4.5 and 4.6, but then famously went completely bonkers and counterproductive in version five, as parodied in this “opus fived” site.

Fable: Currently the most powerful Anthropic model available to the public. Expensive. Good for “long horizon” programming tasks, like doing a bunch of research and compiling evidence and making a plan and building a thing and troubleshooting independently without human input. Fable kind of marks a change to models that are supposedly able to “do more shit on their own”.. which sounds cool, but I currently find that to generally be a bad idea and a waste of money, unless you're a software engineer with deep pockets and a very well-defined project at hand, with no variables or uncertainty in your plan for how to build something. When there's any ambiguity in a plan, these models can go on all kinds of expensive and misguided tangents.

Mythos: The souped-up version of Fable that only big-shot companies and research institutions and the US government have access to, because it's capable of discovering vulnerabilities in software that humans were never able to find before, and using those exploits to majorly fuck up governments, companies, or really whatever internet-connected system it wants to. This was the model the white house banned for a few weeks.

Phew! Okay so.... my hot take is yeah just use Sonnet for now. It's fast. It's affodable. It makes good choices. It doesn't overthink.