Sonnet 5.5 scoring higher (70.6) than Opus 5.5 (66.4) in Terminal-Bench is interesting. I looked into this, because it felt strange.
Turns out that Opus had 10% of its trials answered by a fallback model due to safeguards; versus only 1.5% fallbacks for Sonnet. [1] So I would not read too much into this, just the difference in fall backs could probably explain the gap.
Why isn't that worth reading into? I care about the experience of actually using the model, not hypothetically what it could achieve without overactive guardrails
You can read “a little bit” (i.e. “not too much”) into it (it does indeed tell you about the out-of-the-box experience), but e.g. being able to know when a fallback model has been used means that in terms of pure accuracy, you might still be better off defaulting to Opus 5.5 and re-routing to Sonnet 5.5 yourself when you get the fallback.
abejora · · focus · HN ↗
Turns out that Opus had 10% of its trials answered by a fallback model due to safeguards; versus only 1.5% fallbacks for Sonnet. [1] So I would not read too much into this, just the difference in fall backs could probably explain the gap.
[1] Section 8.5 of the Sonnet 5.5 System Card
eli · · focus · HN ↗
spider-mario · · focus · HN ↗