But that's just the obvious. There are task by task differences (component by component, page by page, context by context) that the model is worse and better at, even though they are all within the general category of UI design.

I honestly don't have the clarity of mind to explain this coherently, but the crux of my point is that there's a huge variation in it's performance in different contexts, often ones that seem near similar, and in result, even Sol can beat Opus 5.5 in some variations of UI design.

And this is my problem in benchmarking and comparing model performance in general. Presently, we try to create broad categories to benchmark against, create a set of tasks, and then average out the results. That works generally, but it's kind of misleading and it's partly what drives people to feel a disconnect between benchmarks numbers and real world usage on their specific tasks.

It's such a messy field that it's kind of maddening.

Familiarity breeds contempt.

For comparison:

    Sol 6.1:    $10 / $2  / $0.10
    Opus 5.5:   $20 / $4  / $0.20
    Astra 6:    $50 / $10 / $1
    Fable 5.1:  $50 / $10 / $0.25

(One caveat: A Claude or GPT subscription still gives you way more value compared to API pricing.)

Exciting times in any case! We really need more direct competition to OpenAI and Anthropic.

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Edit: As another comment pointed out, official pricing is now available and it's about 2/3 the price of Kimi K3: https://platform.kimi.ai/docs/pricing/chat#model-pricing

And not to mention the gargantuan amount of tokens you get with the US labs' subscription plans. I still cannot see a reason to use this as an end consumer.

At this point, the only reason why Anthropic has an advantage is laziness on the deciders' side (of which there is a lot) and, for non-coding work, the Claude harness is significantly better than most alternatives. For coding there are several model-agnostic alternatives on par or better than the frontier labs' own offerings. But arguably that is not yet true for office/document work.

Calculate the price to revenue ratio of all companies and select whichever ones have the best ratio.

For now it's Anthropic. But i don't see how they can maintain this leader position when other companies can provide similar services with models good enough for 90% use cases and at way lower cost.

Anthropic so far is doing a good job building and serving frontier models, they built a nice toolset around it (the web ui, desktop and cli apps ...) but the problem is to justify their IPO price and the huge investments when their moat is so thin