Thread

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. RGS1811 · 1790098716 · focus · HN ↗
  "This is a classic test request..."
  I know there's been discussion about whether pelicanmaxxing is happening, but this is at least evidence that Claude was explicitly exposed to this problem.
  1. simonw · 1790098765 · focus · HN ↗
    See here for more discussion of that: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49803892#49804881">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49803892#49804881
    dgellow · 1790101059 · focus · HN ↗
    Just want to say: you’re such a legend, please do not stop sharing your pelicans, it’s always fun to see how they change over the months :)
  2. cubefox · 1790099300 · focus · HN ↗
    The model recognizing the task doesn't mean it was benchmaxxed (RLVR-trained) to solve it. It might simply recognize it from pre-training on Internet text.
  3. croemer · 1790102155 · focus · HN ↗
    Of course it was exposed - not sure it's explicit or not. Why wouldn't HackerNews comments be part of the training data? And Simon's blog and the many discussions about Pelicans? It'd be hard to miss. Doesn't mean Anthropic has made this an explicit goal in training.
  4. 0x10ca1h0st · 1790105513 · focus · HN ↗
    Lets start frog riding motorcycle trend until they frogmaxx, or cat driving convertible.
    agar · 1790119453 · focus · HN ↗
    At least pick something that will result in a good name:
    "Create an SVG of Shaquille O'Neal eating potato chips shaped like a telecopier."
    Shaq'sFaxSnacksMaxx
  5. pgwhalen · 1790113709 · focus · HN ↗
    It would be genuinely shocking at this point if any of the frontier models weren't well exposed to the problem.

Open on Hacker News to reply ↗

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.