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Qwen3.8 Max now ranked as the best overall model by agentic index

420 points · 270 comments · apitman

  1. theropost · · focus · HN ↗
    Anthropic is a bit nuts, I had $260 of credits on my max account for the extra usage the other night. It was expiring, so I figured I'll fire up an agentic swarm to deep dive and make some deep changes to some old cold bases.. literally 25 minutes or less, $260 burnt, it didn't get get into the implementation, just wrote a ton of useless plans for the most part. It really opened my eyes to what they expect to charge people.. wayyyy overpriced.
    1. mikae1 · · focus · HN ↗
      And at that cost they're still not profitable. It's going to be a bumpy road ahead...
      1. swalsh · · focus · HN ↗
        I think profitability is a matter of accounting. Inference is where money is made, but training is where money is spent. We keep getting new models every few months, but frankly the old models are still quite usable. I suspect labs will soon start specializing in expert models per use case so they can increase the lifespan of individual models, and change the profitability per model.
        1. CuriouslyC · · focus · HN ↗
          That's not the only reason to go to expert models. The more different domains you try to stuff in there, the more parameters the model needs to keep things coherent and not overload tokens in a way that induces errors. For example, if a model trained only on biology text sees "sonic hedgehog" there's no ambiguity, and this compounds for all the things that are "overloaded," in the training corpus, which turns out to be quite a bit.
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