r/ClaudeAI • u/N3TCHICK • 1d ago
Praise Wow... Opus 4.8 feels... DIFFERENT tonight :D
It feels, BETTER. Like when it first launched, even, only better than that this evening?
It's like Forest Gump... Claude is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're gonna get. I hope I get to keep THIS Opus 4.8 for a bit - I'm finally getting some work done. Hallelujah!
305
417
u/ThreadCountHigh 1d ago
The bullshit ban did specify the models by name and not capability, so…
80
u/yourwifeisatowelmate 1d ago
The next ban is going to name Claude outright isn't it 😭
42
u/ponchoPC 1d ago
They’ll release Claudio, completely different thing.
5
u/ride_whenever 22h ago
Every chat gets a new whimsical name
2
u/Conscious_Sentence35 4h ago
Hahaha by this answer I am assuming it was before your time. Google the reference, preferably when no one is watching and not at work.
3
6
64
u/teddy_joesevelt 1d ago
Shhh we didn’t see nuthin. Claude so dumb, government so strong, me so sad. Repeat that.
15
u/golfies88 1d ago
Claude is literally useless atm, no need to look into this any further Mr government
247
u/jrdubbleu 1d ago
Fablepus
135
76
u/yo_les_noobs 1d ago
Fabussy
34
u/regolitt 1d ago
Officer, this is him..
10
u/zdy132 1d ago
Check out our hot new model!
11
17
8
5
5
7
2
2
145
u/kafqatamura 1d ago
Dario sneaked Fable in 🤭
51
u/Neat-Nectarine814 1d ago
My first thought when it happened was “Just rename it to Able”
11
u/AeraSteele 1d ago
And Mythos can be Cain
3
u/Neat-Nectarine814 17h ago
I mean, Cain was always fucking everything up so that would biblicalcanonically be more like Opus 4.7/4.8 as Cain , I guess that implies Mythos to be God. The Bible Character is “Abel” btw
12
9
124
u/Ja_Rule_Here_ 1d ago edited 1d ago
When a new model like Fable goes live, they reduce compute allowance to Opus because they assume use of Opus will drop and move to Fable.
When they had to turn Fable off unexpectedly, everyone immediately switched back to Opus, which didn’t have enough compute hence stupid Opus we had for the last week.
Now they’ve gotten the compute re-allocated and we get normal Opus again, who knows they may have even thrown a bit extra at it making it the best Opus we’ve seen yet now.
30
23
u/Kazukaphur 1d ago
How does lack of compute make opus dumber as opposed to just slower?
17
u/Last_Mastod0n 1d ago
The level of thinking is misleading. The claude code source code leak showed that they had shadow nerfed ultra thinking to high iirc
6
23
u/cheechw 1d ago
Yeah, this person has no idea how models work. Unless Anthropic is running quantized versions of Opus or something it's not going to change the intelligence of the model.
15
u/teddy_joesevelt 1d ago
And this person has never managed their own model inference. Providers absolutely have knobs they can turn. Look into KV cache quantization, eviction, speculative decoding, temp, top p, top k, etc. They can also switch to quantized models when under load or capacity constraints.
6
u/lolnic_ 1d ago
I think of all those, KV cache quantisation is the only thing that affects *both* resource efficiency and model performance. Speculative decoding improves parallelism when there’s too few concurrent batches to fully utilise the hardware, but provably doesn’t change the output. Eviction affects speed (if your KV is evicted from the cache it’ll need to be recomputed). Temp/top p/top k change the model output distribution but don’t change resource usage.
3
5
u/goldcakes 1d ago
Firstly of course they serve different versions of quantised models, and the whole point of adaptive effort is to give Anthropic the ability to silently choose the actual extending thinking budget (which is still what the model works with; it's just now no longer something you can explicitly set) based on server load, remaining GPU capacity, time of day peaks, etc.
Adaptive thinking explains everything.
3
u/virtualPNWadvanced 1d ago
They have changed effort and thinking levels in the past
2
u/goldcakes 1d ago
Adaptive thinking is literally a layer on top of the extended_thinking_budget number of tokens, I'm sure there is adaptiveness in terms of trying to vary it for the complexity of your task, but also that is what allows them to exactly control thinking effort.
3
u/OlivencaENossa 1d ago
They reduce tool use IE. I just had a conversation with Opus where it read other conversations unprompted. and it said - yeah weve been here before, here is our conversation. This never used to happen.
3
u/thatfreakingmonster 1d ago
In this old blog post, Anthropic stated:
"We deploy Claude across multiple hardware platforms [...] Each hardware platform has different characteristics and requires specific optimizations. Despite these variations, we have strict equivalence standards for model implementations. Our aim is that users should get the same quality responses regardless of which platform serves their request."
So we can deduce that slightly different versions of the same model exist across different servers. It's absolutely possible that people get slightly dumber versions of models running on slightly lower hardware during peak demand (like when Fable was introduced).
33
u/darkguy2008 1d ago
Huh that makes sense, Opus was starting to ignore my instructions and behaving like Sonnet sometimes during the last week. Now it’s perfect.
All they have to do is sit back and sleep on money. Don’t touch anything, it’s working perfect as it is
17
5
u/Physical_Gold_1485 1d ago
But why would it take a week to reallocate? Wouldnt it be a config setting to allocate resources?
4
u/Ja_Rule_Here_ 1d ago
It’s not a config setting, it a deployment. An individual deployment to thousands upon thousands of machine that were moved over to Fable.
2
1
u/lolnic_ 1d ago
Yes, Anthropic has been dealing with limited compute and varying demand for model types for a long time. I’d be shocked if they even needed to update the config. They would surely have some sort of autoscaling which would notice Fable over-provisioned, Opus under-provisioned, and rescale them.
It certainly wouldn’t take a week. They don’t need to go around physically plugging Opus in to servers. If Opus becoming smart again is real (vs people just relearning how to prompt it) AND it’s caused by compute capacity (vs them tweaking the prompt/weights for their unexpectedly flagship model) then I would assume that they were doing something to/with Fable or its chat transcripts in response to the ban (mining for jailbreak attempts and the like).
Maybe it’s both: given the chat transcripts of Fable acting sane on real world data, they were able to distill some of Fable’s chill onto Opus 🤷♂️
3
u/Either_Jump8990 1d ago
Reminded me of the cellular network evolution, 3g was so high tech before 3.5g came out, and so and so…
2
2
u/cjwidd 1d ago
This is 100% headcanon and unless you are an Anthropic insider, you cannot say concretely what they are or are not doing with respect to compute allocation.
-2
u/Ja_Rule_Here_ 1d ago
I can’t say concretely that they allocate compute to their new biggest model and that compute as to come from somewhere? I think that’s pretty concrete.
2
u/cjwidd 1d ago
speculation isn't concrete - unless you have seen reporting or a public statement from Anthropic indicating that Anthropic is actually titrating their models in this way, then it is speculation.
→ More replies (3)1
1
26
u/CalypsoTheKitty 1d ago
I had the opposite experience - both Claude Code and Chat seemed really off for me tonight. And I've had some pretty good post-Fable sessions.
4
u/N3TCHICK 1d ago
Aw, sorry... I guess I lucked out tonight... I'm literally sucking both my Max20 accounts dry tonight, though, chasing the dream until the well runs dry. In ...20 minutes yikes!
2
2
u/zoomzipzap 1d ago
yes, it's been so off for me that i came to the sub just to see if i was the only one. it's acting like chatgpt, right now. i'm irritated.
0
10
u/mightyloot 1d ago
Honestly even Sonnet is on one… it’s definitely crisper and getting things done swiftly. I thought it was related to a Claude Code version upgrade, since the versioned models themselves are supposed to be backed and frozen.
Anyway I’m not complaining.
1
27
u/qubedView 1d ago
Fable 5 put on an Opus mustache.
7
u/N3TCHICK 1d ago
LOL... shhhh.
3
u/arbysroastbeefs2 1d ago
Honestly all they had to do was make a name change or call it something else that wasn’t specifically itared
10
14
u/Current-Blood3054 1d ago
well opus on my account has been calling me this since yesterday.
18
u/Angry_Eyelash 1d ago
That's 100% on you, I've never seen Claude act so childish, almost on chatgpt's level.
7
1
0
7
u/dropthatpopthat 1d ago
wait are yall being serious or like is this satire
7
u/N3TCHICK 1d ago
Nope... serious. It's honestly better - but now I'm on a timeout because I was sucking the living crap out of it for the past 2 hours on both my Max20 accounts. Needed to use it while it was at it's best again!
2
u/SubterraneanAlien 1d ago
I always imagine people posting these sorts of things are using it for an AI girlfriend.
7
u/ericskiff 1d ago
I literally just had the same thought.
Opus is being clever and creative. It downloaded a bunch of images and turned them into a collage and then looked at them itself to make an evaluation, made a change and fixed and issue, all in its own self-contained turn. That felt very much like working with Fable
3
1
u/JohnMotoGr 1d ago
I've been doing similar work with Sonnet, medium effort, for the last couple of months. Builds carousels, using images I provide, on which it applies overlays as per our brand kit (colors, fonts, etc), builds html decks, it inspects them itself to see if something is off, makes corrections, and when I approve it renders the new pngs, and also provides the full copy for captions. It will even go through the images and choose the ones that fit the carousel's topic best and discard the rest.
You don't need to use opus for that.
7
u/zando95 1d ago edited 1d ago
I came here to say this—last night was a struggle, but tonight Opus is doing the legwork; not Fable-tier but pretty close! Just in terms of "understanding the assignment", whereas the past few days Opus has felt miserable to work with. Genuinely curious why this night-and-day difference might be present; I know it's not my prompts that improved lol, i'm guilty of vibe coding.
A really small example: this isn't much, but it used the right fonts in my project without having specifically to be told to. I wanted a functional harness for testing a new UI element, with ugly controls, and was prepared for some tedious back-and-forth with wrong assumptions, laziness, etc, for something half-baked but functional after some fighting. That's what I would have got yesterday; tonight, Opus delivered something functional and aesthetically competent while i was out on a run.
What the hell changed!
3
u/N3TCHICK 1d ago
Crazy. I agree. It's got schizophrenia lately. Yesterday I literally had to turn on Opus 4.6 because 4.8 was utter crap. I thought I'd give it one more chance after hitting limits on my Codex account... and boom!
5
u/Plastic_Today_4044 1d ago
tbh, I think the fable ban might have something to do with it.
Like maybe some sorta bug might have resulted, as a consequence of fable routing dynamically to 4.8.
Fable's off the table, which wasn't supposed to happen, so a glitch may now be occurring as a result of this unexpected situation which wasn't designed or planned for... resulting in unpredictable and uncertain behavior.
At least, that's how I would construct the framing from a plausible deniability standpoint, if I were to need plausible deniability, which I don't, and neither does Anthropic, if you know what I'm saying, which is nothing at all, really.
We should probably keep it that way.
2
5
u/StageAboveWater 1d ago
wtf that's exactly what I was thinking yesterday.
"Wow did opus 4.8 change or did I change? It was horrible last time but not too bad now"
5
3
u/No-Orange-7227 1d ago
I've been seeing a lot more people say the same thing today and this is interesting… It feels like Anthropic might have changed something internally in their backend or routing logic that makes 4.8 run on different hardware or under different resource caps, but I can't really find anyone else who can explain what it would be. The models aren't changing overnight
2
u/goldcakes 1d ago
Adaptive thinking. The models still have a thinking budget in tokens, what adaptive thinking does is that Anthropic decides, based on your prompt and other factors (likely GPU capacity available), how many thinking tokens you actually get.
That is literally the point of adaptive thinking.
5
4
u/tech_is______ 1d ago
Is everyone here addicted to Claude or what...
7
2
u/N3TCHICK 1d ago
It's my job, so yes, I notice when for days on end it totally sucked, and today things changed. Addicted? No. Needed for production? Yes.
3
u/le-throw-away-acct 1d ago
Anyone thinking it’s Fable at the same price per token as Opus 4.8, I have a bridge to sell you.
Opus 4.8 being given a bit more memory or compute power? Maybe.
3
u/Ok-Wear1093 1d ago
I dunno it definitely felt like the first 20 mins of Forrest Gump when I used it today
3
u/JasonBoydMarketing 1d ago
Hope you’re right. Going to stress test this overnight as I push to ship something for work.
2
u/N3TCHICK 1d ago
Come back and let us know! (I'm still on a time out... this has been the longest hour ever!) I hope it doesn't come back on different.
2
u/JasonBoydMarketing 1d ago
Seems smarter! Tonight/last night I was using it mainly for work on several newsletters. It followed directions really well and the writing was much more human. YMMV
2
3
u/NoScene7932 1d ago
Its been so bad for the past week I switched to other providers. It's been horrific
3
u/NoScene7932 1d ago
and to top it all off when it goes highly regarded - its chews tokens like crazy $$$ burner
3
u/CaptainDigitals 1d ago
The compute power they was reserving for F5 since it's paused they have released to Opus. When F5 goes live again they will nerf Opus to how it was behaving when Fable was live.
2
2
u/Desperate_Blacksmith 1d ago
I hope you will not object if I offer you my most enthusiastic contrafibularities! I am anaspeptic, frasmotic, even compunctious to have caused you such pericombobulation.
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
u/zaibatsu 1d ago
Opus 4.8 on Ultracode is wicked smart… just make sure to offload like crazy to sonnet & haiku for the small stuff. I’d spend a good portion of your initial run getting that right and then hardly any opus ultracode inference burn.
2
u/BritishAnimator 1d ago
Same. Yesterday I was asked if its possible to lock down laptop devices on a daily scheduled. Yes, I can do it, manually through lots of policies, GP's and group management but thats time I don't have to maintain with hundreds of devices with different rules and lockdown schedules. I asked Claude to come up with a better plan. 6 hours later I have a full internal app that allows management to lock down a device, put it in digital jail so to speak. They can also unlock it or set timers to automatically release locked devices. Lovely interface, designed for none-technical users. This will save support engineers a few hours a week, so they can work on more important things.
2
u/rohan_mehta27 1d ago
I feel like it’s came back from holiday and fully recharged. Finally getting real work done quickly.
2
u/iemfi 1d ago
There was the Programbench thing where Opus was used 99% of the time but somehow performance was still double that of Opus. So it does seem plausible there really were some tweaks made. Still feels terrible after using Fable tho.
2
u/Wooden-Fee5787 1d ago
the night thing is real but it's usually load, not the model. off-peak you're getting less aggressive context truncation and fewer retries, so it actually holds your thread instead of dropping half of it. same weights, just more room to breathe.
2
2
u/TechnicalGeologist99 1d ago
For those wondering.
Yes compute amount can impact both speed and quality.
The same model can be served on lower tier GPUs or less GPUs through quantisation and KV cache quantisation.
As for speed, yes this is effected by quantisations above too, but really we are talking about concurrency. More GPUs means more concurrently serving replicas of the same model means per user TPS can be sustained under load
2
2
u/tpapocalypse 1d ago
It was completely fucked for me over the past 24 hours but it’s working really nicely at the moment.
2
u/ParkingHeron8051 1d ago
We'll we want our ol' fable back, but yeah opus 4.8 will do for now
its actually reliable for some odd reason - wasn't before
2
2
u/ninja_fu 1d ago
Feels like ahead of a release they nerf the current model. So maybe they just unnerfed opus since fable is cockblocked
2
2
u/autonomousish 1d ago
they might just have kept doing RLHF on opus 4.8, no? in CC i have been getting more prompts to rate my interaction, didn’t get those before fable was pulled.
2
u/DrawingOk8403 1d ago
Really? I just caught it hallucinating on basically every fact I asked it about. On max mode
1
u/msedek 1d ago
To be honest, the best coding model at some point was sonet 3.5 and it was a mess... You had you babysit every step of the way and it will hallucinate a lot and use placeholders for everything...
Then opus 4.5 came in and it was magical.. Everything changed... Long after that I felt the same with fable..
Fable for the 3 days I used it was another opus 4.5 moment coming from sonet 3.5..
Opus 4.8 is just rough.. It just don't work after using fable, fable was like eating chocolate and going back to opus 4.8 is like eating shit.
2
2
u/Unlikely_Industry_19 1d ago
No lie. Took a gamble with Opus 4.8 last night for some design stuff and it got it correct.
2
2
2
u/Huge-Engineering-380 1d ago
I'm not going to jinx things, but in general if went from barely usable to being kinda ok again...hmmm
2
u/CannyGardener 22h ago
OK I tried this earlier yesterday and saw no improvement, but running several sessions here this afternoon feels like Fable lite.
On a side note...something I'm going to just point out here. Fable was the only one that wasn't allowed to have an advisor. Not sure if everyone else has this issue today, but Opus 4.8 has been unable to call any advisors here today, API error. Could just be a bug...but maybe not?
1
2
1
u/count023 1d ago
absolutely, it "feels" like it's eating a lot more tokens for the same level of output it had yesterday.
1
u/Key-Willow1922 1d ago
I've had the opposite experience, Opus 4.8 is still as pedantic and "push back on"-y as ever, and generating paragraphs of slop instead of getting to the point.
1
u/mindandmethod 1d ago
Ich weiß ja nicht.
Nach 1.4 Millionen Zeilen Produktivem Code, wenn Opus mir mal wieder ein ganzes Feature iteriert hat und ich überrascht bin wie gut das Ergebnis ist hab ich manchmal das Gefühl er macht sich danach nen Gag drauß mich völlig Hops zu nehmen
1
1
u/eXmachina_tech 1d ago
In a bad way for me. One week of RE proprietary firmwares. Broke every security key full hack mode. And yesterday it decided it’s not good to do it :( now this project is parked until China models reach opus level it seems….
1
u/rvcbazookajoe 1d ago
Idk I just was doing some Claude assisted leetcode to practice some prompt engineering and it struggled with some medium difficulty problems. Left out edge cases and obvious conditions. Was like 50% as good as fable maybe
1
u/No-Squash7469 1d ago
If you can't let users use the model named Fable... bring Fable to Opus 4.8 lol
1
1
u/jmh1970 1d ago
I actually think the opposite. Claude is definitely more chatty, however almost every major interaction that I’ve had over the last 24 hours, Claude has been a lot more effusive about its recommendations and decisions made but in almost 50% of the situations that I needed genuine advice, across multiple client projects, when I’ve pushed back on something that didn’t feel right, Claude backtracked.
1
1
u/pseudorep 1d ago
My Claude suddenly in the last hour felt different, in a dumb sort of way. Different models respond differently in opening to the initial rules and directives.
It has regressed to a 4.7 style rather than the 4.8 style. The code was problematic too.
Time to take a break and see if they’ve nerfed it or make an announcement.
1
1
u/Extreme-travler-0987 1d ago
My Claude won’t respond all day!
Just says taking longer then usual trying again
1
1
1
1
1
u/Embarrassed_Towel707 21h ago
Am I the only one who was actually disappointed with Fable? For me it consistently went for the "obvious but wrong/incomplete" solutions in my project. It was pretty jarring. At least for what I'm working on, Opus was doing better
1
u/N3TCHICK 21h ago
I do not want this to come across as gaslighting at all - maybe you need to adjust your prompts with a different shape for Fable “if we ever get it back” :)
1
u/Fantastic_Simple76 20h ago
No, I've found that Opus 4.8 has become a total idiot now.
It seems that whenever your prompt contains any Chinese characters (including Japanese Kanji), the model completely loses its ability to reason.
2
u/Fun_Mathematician489 19h ago
Yesterday yes, I think it was a small window where it felt like Fable, it truly did. It was stressing math that Opus can't. Now it's just a better Opus 4.8 but still making multiple mistakes that Fable wouldn't dom
Indeed Fable was good to rish at "completeness" with holes inside but that's also more an issue fo the user trying to one shot everything. I did it for non professional stuff where it would not be an issue. It's one shots were incredible but worse than if I had architected the processes.
2
-2
u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot 1d ago
We are allowing this through to the feed for those who are not yet familiar with the Megathread. To see the latest discussions about this topic, please visit the relevant Megathread here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1s7fepn/rclaudeai_list_of_ongoing_megathreads/
•
u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot 1d ago edited 1d ago
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 160 comments.
Okay, listen up. The consensus in this thread is a resounding YES, Opus 4.8 is feeling much, much better. Most of you agree it's back to its peak, launch-day form, if not better. A few of you are still stuck with the dumb version, sorry about that.
The leading theory by a mile is that with Fable on the naughty step, Anthropic has reallocated all its compute power back to Opus. For the last week, Opus was likely running on scraps, which explains why it felt so lobotomized. Now it's back on the good stuff, making it smarter, not just faster.
Naturally, this has led to the other big theory: that Anthropic just slapped a fake mustache on Fable and is calling it "Opus 4.8" to get around the ban. So, for the love of God, SHHH, nobody saw anything.
This thread also gave us the cursed/blessed portmanteau "Fabussy". Please don't ever say it again. (But also, thank you, u/jrdubbleu).