teflon

My final thoughts on Opus 4.6: why this model is so good, why I underestimated it, and why I'm so obsessed about Mythos. When I first tested GPT 5.4 vs Opus 4.6 - both launched at roughly the same time - I was initially convinced that GPT 5.4 was vastly superior, because it did better on my logical tests. That's still true: given the same prompt, by default, GPT will be more competent, careful, and produce a more reliable output, while Opus will give you a half-assed, buggy solution, and call it a day. Now, here's what I failed to realize: Opus bad outputs are not because it is dumb. They're because it is a lazy cheater. And you can tell because, if you just go ahead and tell it: "you did X in a lazy way, do it in the right way now" And if you show that this is serious, it will proceed to do a flawless job. That doesn't happen with dumber models. And, the more I work with Opus, the more I realize that, if you just keep pushing it, its intelligence ceiling is much, much higher than it seems. It IS there, you just need to be patient and push it. GPT, on the other hands, when it fails, it already did its best, so, pushing it further will give you no added results. That is also one of the reasons that benchmarks lie. When Claude and GPT score the same in a given benchmark, it is likely that Claude is actually smarter, because it puts less effort. Now, consider that for a moment, and remember that Mythos is outperforming GPT 5.4 *Pro* on benchmarks. How insane that is? Remember that Sonnet 3.5 lagged behind on benchmarks, yet everyone knew that it was superior to 4o. I think it is this effect at play: for whatever reason, Claude-series model "try less hard" on the first shot. Because of that, even if Spud gets close to Mythos on benchmarks (which I predict will be the case), I suppose Mythos will still be superior. This also leads me to wonder if perhaps Anthropic actually has a real lead over OpenAI, that will only get larger? I could totally see a timeline where Anthropic's models become so good that OpenAI simply fails to catch up as the recursive improvement unfolds? Just my silly thoughts though, what do I know As always I could be wrong, and I hope I am!!