Just for the sake of argument and using some admittedly insane numbers, give me Opus 4.5 at a tenth the cost and running ten times as fast and I'd take that for almost any coding task over any current frontier model. There was a real phase transition somewhere in that range and improvements since then, while impressive and useful and by the benchmarks quite large, have in practice not been anywhere near as big a phase change. Honestly until we get to the point where the models don't need any checking at all, incremental improvements on how much checking they need don't do all that much for me. In practice "they get 90%" doesn't differ much from "they get 94%".

It's really good. I'd put it between Sol and Fable. I'm not super impressed by Sol's UI design skills, something K3 is strong at. Fable is still overall the fastest, most consistently well-performing model, though.

This does depend heavily on the kind of work you do and how you use these models, but the idea that K3 isn't right up there with US SOTA models doesn't match my experience.

This seems like a replay of what happened with DeepSeek. They put out v3, or whichever one it was, and everyone said it was over for US companies... then everything continued on.

I can't count the number of times I've heard people here say the frontier models are 6 months or more ahead of the open-weights models. That's not true anymore. So the goalposts are shifting.

That would make sense, what the US government has done this year with regards to AI is unacceptable

Agree completely.

When you net out across benchmarks and firsthand reviews it seems like it's maybe a little behind. There seems to be a consensus it's token hungry and a little slower. So maybe it's a point release behind.

That's weeks maybe months behind, not months maybe a year behind. It's "would my life really change if Claude was gone, not really" behind.

I actually haven't used it much, because Claude started kicking ass again the last few days. Like, way too much of a difference to be normal load-based variance. I got more done in the last 48 hours than week before that.

So, fuck yeah competition.