Sonnet 5 does beat Opus 4.8 on several benchmarks. It just costs more and takes longer.

(On several other benchmarks, it costs more, takes longer, and does worse.)

Possible, but pay-as-you-go Hy3 / DeepSeek v4 Pro / MiMo v2.5 Pro (from respective vendors) are genuinely good enough as daily drivers, given the costs (especially, low prices for input cache, which usually makes up 70%+ of total input for agentic workflows). I put in $10 in DeepSeek & Xiaomi MiMo, and I've barely used $1 each, in a week of coding work.

Coding Plans by MiniMax ($20/mo for 1.7b tokens) and Z.ai (~$30/week use for $17/mo) are also tremendous value for money.

i’ll never really understand this comment. why would labs do this if they know private benchmark evals will come out in the next week?