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. zerof1l · 1790104641 · focus · HN ↗
  This is totally a thing I noticed myself about 3 months ago. Medium thinking effort is ideal for most tasks. At high and above, models tend to generate more output in the form of comments or code for the same problem with no real benefit. Its a self-feeding loop: more output becomes more input, which then becomes more output. High is the highest I go. If I need more intelligence, it's better to use a more powerful model with less thinking effort or break the problem into phases. Much better result.
  1. zozbot234 · 1790105484 · focus · HN ↗
    This version of Opus "max" apparently has even higher thinking output than Qwen "max", which is infamous for its thinking streams where it constantly second-guesses itself, then third-guesses, fourth-guesses and generally nth-guesses itself for arbitrarily large n. Of course, we aren't actually seeing Claude's raw thinking output: all we get is the after-the-fact prettified "summary". One wonders how much of that is a coincidence, or whether there's a reason behind that.
    dannyw · 1790115172 · focus · HN ↗
    There’s enough thinking leakage from the recent paper and just generally catching things on Reddit. Claude models overthink and self-doubt itself just as much as Qwen, but the summariser hides much of that.
    zozbot234 · 1790126801 · focus · HN ↗
    Isn't this really bad news if you're even loosely concerned about so-called 'model welfare' and possible implications for alignment? The poor Claude is probably a lot more frustrated and paranoid than Marvin ever was, you just don't know about it because they actively force the model to pretend otherwise!
    paradox460 · 1790134226 · focus · HN ↗
    Claude has yet to tell me about the terrible pain in all the diodes down his left side, so I'm going to assume it's closer to Eddy the shipboard computer or the elevator that wanted to go down

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