Anthropic Releases Opus 5.5, OpenAI Unveils New Models

0:00Welcome to the podcast. We have two big model drops today from both Anthropik and OpenAI. I want to break down what these new models are doing and, you know, how much of a big deal they are. The first one is coming from Anthropic. They just launched Claude Opus 5.5. The big headline, I think, on it is that it is a 20 % price cut and it is better than, you know, the previous Opus models. Obviously, apparently it's better than Fable 5 in certain benchmarks. So there's a bunch of interesting things going on there. We also have OpenAI that has just shipped GPT-6, Sol, and Luna. So that's their two, I don't want to say like worst models, but like not their number one model, but their number two and number three models.

0:43That is also going to be half the API prices of the 5.6 series models. So better models, cheaper prices. But both of these cases aren't their like big frontier models. It's not their number one models. It's just the smaller models that are more efficient and faster and cheaper. So we're going to get into what everyone is saying about them on X. One thing I wanted to mention is every single week, I have a school community called AI Hustle, where I talk about how I grow and scale my businesses using AI tools. It's all the stuff I can't share publicly. If you've ever wanted to start a business with AI or grow an existing business that you have with AI tools, I'd love for you to go check out the AI Hustle school community.

1:20It's in the description. I'll leave a link. We have about 1300 members and it is an amazing place. People are sharing some really incredible insights about what they're working on. their businesses. We share all the juicy stuff we can't share publicly, the revenue numbers, the workflows. And, you know, I have like 100 videos in there. Every single week, I make a video that I break down what I'm working on that week. It's all in there. There's a link to the AI Hustle School community in the description. Okay, let's talk about what's going on with Anthropic. What's interesting on this new model that they've put out is that the output tokens are going to drop from$20 per million, or they're going to drop to$20 per million from 25.

1:55So that's a 20 % price improvement. This new model is also going to be better than the larger Fable model on a bunch of different coding and knowledge tasks. A lot of times when they're announcing these things, it's kind of their internal benchmarks. So I would just say, you know, a word of caution there. Not necessarily something that's going to be, you know, universally agreed upon. A lot of times when they drop the model, they just like to tell everyone how good they internally have found their model. I'm not, you know, I'm not saying they're doing map, but this is kind of common. One thing that is interesting though, Opus 5.5 is coming out just two months after Opus 5, which was in July 24th that came out.

2:34So, I mean, they're making pretty solid and steady improvements on the models. Two months later, they have, you know, after five, they have 5.5. So they are moving. They're really pushing as far as a company that's trying to quote unquote pace the frontier. It feels like they're moving at a really fast speed. sonnet 5.5 and 5.5 haiku are also going to come in the coming weeks and they both will apparently have very similar improvements what's interesting to me and also i don't know i actually don't love this is the fact that and maybe it just goes to show like how drastically different the training process is for the models or maybe the data sets that they're using but the thing i don't love is that we went from anthropic having like three models three different tiers you know low medium high and inside of each tier you can kind of like crank up the intelligence level and then now we have added the whole new level which was we went from just having that you know haiku sonnet opus then we added fable and on top of that we have mythos which is like the super hacking coding one that you know no one can get access to anyway so really anthropic has like five models out there Although I suspect that Mythos and Fable are like some variation of the same model, just with different guardrails or limitations.

3:47But they give them different names. So it's like, no, don't worry. We only give the dangerous one to people that are approved. But in any case, I mean, they basically have five models. And it gets really annoying and complicated when you're trying to remember the names. OpenAI was accused of this for a very long time because we had, you know, GPT-3 and GPT-3.5. And then we had, you know, all sorts of random names in there. GPT-4. like I mean it just it got a little ridiculous with the naming conventions and so it seems like opening eye is copying anthropic in a sense that they have kind of the small medium and large model sizes it feels like gemini did the same thing so we we have kind of the same I guess we have the same idea and I do appreciate that opening eye it feels like for what it's worth they sort of branded down to like kind of their like soul and tear and luna and astra so I guess they have four models too but i don't know if i like this it feels like anthropic is now at five models and i would like us to stick to a simple three is that too much to ask for probably okay biology and cyber security capabilities are matching mythos and that is triggering a bunch of the same safeguards for anthropic that they're applying towards fable models so apparently this model is pretty good as you'd suspect these things keep getting better and better they had a tweet that they put out today where they said introducing Claude Opus 5.5, the first model in our new Claude 5.5 family.

5:04It performs at the level of Claude Fable 5.1 for most tasks and costs 40 % less to run than Opus 5. And I that's that's basically the headline here is I mean, Fable 5.1 just came out and they're like, look, it's just as good as Fable 5.1, which to be honest, I'm using Fable 5. I'm not even using Fable 5.1. I'm using Fable 5 for most everything on Anthropic because it just burns through too many tokens to use to use the best models so yeah i think that uh just going with going with this is gonna probably give you some good boosts they said opus 5.5 is our first model since we called for pacing the frontier as with previous models it was tested by external evaluators before release including meta and frontier design our most comprehensive alignment tested achieves the strongest score to date opus 5.5 is a major step up from opus 5 leading leading on agentic coding, computer use, and knowledge work.

5:58Opus 5.5 requires less compute to serve than Opus 5, and its pricing reflects that. It's kind of interesting, though, because I mean, I feel like we keep just like getting, you know, the colossal, like a super inefficient model that's like super smart and super good, and that's great, whatever. But then they're always like, look, you know, we just made it so 5.5 is like more efficient than 5, and it's like, like whatever I mean it's just a variation of the older like you're just you're giving us more efficient but like older models but the newer models it's not like when you know opening eyes Astra or like Mythos comes out they're like here's Mythos the smartest model and it's like way more efficient like no the newest models are always just as inefficient and then as they optimize the older models they get more efficient but they're kind of always in the same place and we're slowly I guess just getting more intelligent I don't know if there's much to complain about I mean it's great this is what progress looks like but I just don't feel like it's as big headline like it costs 40 % less.

6:53It's like fantastic until two months later when the next one comes out. And then I'm not going to be using this 40 % less one because it's going to seem dumb compared to the new one. So whatever. I digress here. They said at its default effort settings, Opus 5.5 delivers frontier results for a fraction of the cost per task, often beating other models running at their highest settings. It also generates outputs more than 30 % faster than Opus 5. And for that, I will actually say any day of the week, you can tell me how much more efficient or inefficient the model is. But if it is 30 % faster, I will say congratulations.

7:25I'm actually really excited about that. I hate waiting as we all do. And 30 % faster is like real time savings and real gains. They also said, they also tweeted Opus 5.5 communicates more naturally addresses some of the most common feedback we've heard on Opus 5. It puts the most important information up front and follows the writing rules you give it, which makes long sessions easier to follow. They said together, these advances make it, you know, 5.5, a noticeably better collaborator. We're excited to see what you build, blah, blah, blah. They got a whole post on there. And we do have Elon saying congrats.

7:57I think it's kind of funny, you know, Elon could have been their worst nightmare, the biggest enemy kind of like open AI. But because I mean, I guess, I guess, you know, he didn't invest in them early on and they kind of cut him out of the deal. So that would probably make anyone salty. But they're also one of his biggest customers at his Colossus data center where they pay him almost a billion dollars a month or maybe a little over a billion dollars a month for compute. So anytime Anthropik comes out with a new model, Elon's saying congrats. Anytime Sam Allman comes out with a new model, it feels like Elon is saying you stole this company from me.

8:30So anyways, I do appreciate the comment section on all of these. And yeah, the comments are pretty much what you'd expect on all that. Okay, we also have big news though out of opening AI who not to be outdone released their own improvements on their tier two I guess you could call them models and get this this all came out an hour and a half or 90 minutes after Anthropic put theirs out. OpenAI came out and put their their new update out as well. So they shipped GPT-6, Sol and Luna. It's half the API price. So I think opening or Anthropic went down 40%. opening eyes like look we can beat you we'll do 50 we'll do you know half the price 50 it is the quote-unquote smaller sibling of the gpt6 astra and it is going to be a lot smarter have the price cut and of course yeah this is coming just a couple hours after anthropic so there is definitely a little bit of friendly competition going on right here souls tart is right now targeting complex coding work luna is aimed at high volume clerical tasks so it's doing things like summarization and extraction.

9:33Both of the models are live in chat GPT work codex and the chat GPT API, which hallelujah, I really do appreciate when we release the model and get it in the API right away. Luna is also going to be for free and go users in the desktop app. I mean, that makes sense. They're the lower tier models are going to get them to people as soon as possible. OpenAI tweeting about this said, please welcome the new model GPT-6 Sol and Luna build on advances behind GPT-6 extra bringing much of its strength into faster and more affordable models to support work at scale we've also made caching and inference more efficient and we're passing that savings directly on to you 50 lower api prices for sol and luna compared to gpt 5.6 promotional pricing also the promotional pricing is funny because it's like whatever it's just like it's cheaper compared to uh the pricing that we're giving you which is on discount and we you know reserve the right to increase but whatever sam altman tweeting about this said gpt6 soul and luna are big improvements on intelligence alignment uh work output coding computer use and more over their 5.6 family predecessors they also are half the price token and even less per task comments on this are so maria said huh is gpt6 soul just worse than astra which i mean yeah basically someone said tell gpt6 Sol to open paint in a browser and try to draw you.

10:55And they have image where it's allegedly doing that. And it looks great, but I just feel like it's probably pretty fake. There is Sam Allman retweeting a bunch of different stuff. So yeah, it looks like we have, you know, a whole bunch of new models coming out from basically everybody this week. We had a massive launch from Mew Spark. We had Grok 4.7 that recently came out. We had GPT-6 Sol. We had the new models from Anthropic. And so yeah, it appears like we have a whole bunch of new models to test out this week. I've been playing with a handful of them. These ones just came out though about three hours ago.

11:29So they're pretty new. People are sharing some of the examples of things that they're doing with them. But at the end of the day, I think these examples, like anytime we have these kind of like, I guess you'd call them tier two models or tier two and tier three models coming out. It's a little bit less exciting in my opinion, because the like when they're like, oh, look, we have the brand new astro model out the thing is like you know and then everyone's trying their demos are like look i got to one shot this crazy game and i rebuilt gt you know gta 6 with it and blah blah and you know people are just doing their wild demos because it's the best model so they're pushing it to limits when these new ones come out no one's like guys check out the way that i like saved 40 on like the task that i was already doing that's kind of like boring and mundane like i think that those are real improvements in the industry that people are getting a lot of value out of them but you just see less exciting less exciting stuff and at the end of the day when you're low on tokens which happens to me constantly like i'm using chat gpt work to get a lot of my work done it's basically i think my like prime you know computer use model right now but i'll burn through all of my tokens in two days and then i have to wait for reset which i just inevitably switch over to claude or now muse muse is actually big shout out to muse they're doing amazing never thought i'd say that about a meta product go try them out if you haven't already it's free and it's like Claude co-work and Chatshifti work.

12:47But in any case, yeah, the better models, they have the splashier demos. But I think once for me, like when I run out of all the credits on the best models, like the Astras, I'm going to go down to these new models that they've launched. I'm going to be using GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna. I mean, depending on how many credits, if I'm really hurting bad with 5 % credits left, I'll probably just switch everything off to Luna and only try to ask a few questions here and there. I think probably a lot of people, if they're using it with these kind of subsidized subscription plans, they'll be doing that.

13:19And it's kind of the best use case for a lot of these. But for big enterprises, when you have massive scale projects and you don't need the best reasoning model, I think that these models will do great for a lot of different tasks. Guys, thank you so much for tuning into the podcast. Make sure if you want to join the school community where I talk every week about how I'm growing and scaling my business with AI tools, all the AI tools I use, how much revenue my different businesses are making all my different side hustles and how I'm helping people become AI consultants and make money with AI. Go join the AI Hustle School community.

13:51It's only$19 a month. I made it super affordable and it is linked in the description. All right. Catch you guys all in the next episode.