Opus 5.5 resets the model landscape; Astra's 3D demo sets the bar
The author argues Opus 5.5 killed the '15% worse but cheaper' strategy, and that non-OpenAI/Anthropic models now need a showcaseable novel capability like Astra's 3D output.
It feels like Opus 5.5 has pretty much broken the entire model landscape At this point for a model to be interesting it has to do something novel and different, the "15% worse but way cheaper!" thing just doesn't work anymore (not that it ever really did, but I think 5.5 has made it way worse since it's so good on every metric) It's why I liked/defended muse wonder full and am still using it a ton. The thing it has that's novel is it's "voice". It's close enough to frontier to be usable, but unlike the other stuff in this bucket it doesn't feel like a watered down Claude and as such I actually kept using it In order for a model to matter outside of OpenAI and Anthropic at this point it has to have some novel capability. And I think in order for it to get large scale attention it has to be something easily showcase-able similar to the 3D stuff from Astra. The "voice" of muse wonder full is something you can't really show in a catchy way on here and only matters when you feel it which requires getting a $50/mo. Meta sub which no one is going to do thus no one cares about the model. Which sucks because I like it, but also they did this to themselves. The wonder drop was really screwed up: horrible names for the model, limited to the sub for the good model, etc.