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Claude Opus 5.5 Intelligence, Performance and Price Analysis (Max)

333 points · 106 comments · theanonymousone

simonw · 1790098486 · focus · HN ↗
This is the page for the "max" reasoning setting. The page for xhigh is <a href="https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/claude-opus-5-5-xhigh" rel="nofollow">https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/claude-opus-5-5-xhigh and the page for medium (the default setting) is <a href="https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/claude-opus-5-5-medium" rel="nofollow">https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/claude-opus-5-5-medium
I've failed twice to get "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle" to work with max, because in both cases it ran out of the 128,000 token budget while it was still reasoning about the problem.
I'm suspicious that "max" may be virtually useless if it's that easy to have it overthink to the point that it doesn't get to a response.
Transcript for one attempt here - expand the "Reasoning trace" bit to see it: <a href="https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgist.github.com%2Fsimonw%2F61fd7c3683fffce9a3ab7c43d1180024#reasoning-3" rel="nofollow">https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht...
1. az226 · 1790098607 · focus · HN ↗
  How did you get the reasoning trace? Is it the actual one or the summarized one?
  1. simonw · 1790098642 · focus · HN ↗
    It's the summarized one returned by their API.
    Piping the visible reasoning trace through their token counter API (I use <a href="https://tools.simonwillison.net/claude-token-counter" rel="nofollow">https://tools.simonwillison.net/claude-token-counter for that) counts 27,888 tokens, so it's definitely a summary of the 128,000 actual token trace.

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