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Comment by mindwok | Hacker News Reader

The assumption here is that having "the best" model is not worth that much of a premium over a "good enough" model at a lower price. This remains to be seen, though, and people's behaviour paying for Claude Code and Codex suggests at least for now people are willing to pay.

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A lot of people use Opus more than Fable, so yeah, a "good enough model" definitely exist.

That's just because opus 5.5 is arguably better than fable 5.1. I'm sure once a better model comes out, people will want to use it

Even before opus 5.5(which is opus 5), most people i know still used it more than Fable. Fable is kind of big gun that you use when opus fail.

It also assumes Anthropic can maintain the lead. If anything the competition both in the USA and in China seems to be getting closer and closer to parity with Claude.

> This remains to be seen, though, and people's behaviour paying for Claude Code and Codex suggests at least for now people are willing to pay.

I feel like this will depend on the user.

I use Claude a lot at work and Deepseek for personal stuff, and they feel very comparable to me. I haven't found a task using Deepseek that makes me wish I had Claude - especially given how expensive Claude is.

This is important. I think people would pay a large premium for a marginal increase in intelligence. Primarily because intelligence is correlated with exponential utility which is often ignored.

For example, I'd much rather pay for the highest intelligence model when designing something or developing something because the problems it can preempt will save me more money in the long run.

The whole issue is that intelligence (as measured in AA benchmarks for example) is not linear utility

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