alt Hacker NewsMeasuring Claude 4.7's tokenizer costs
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Contrary to people here who feel the price increases, reduction of subscription limits etc are the result of the Anthropic models being more expensive to run than the API & subscription revenue they generate I have a theory that Anthropic has been in the enshittification & rent seeking phase for a while in which they will attempt to extract as much money out of existing users as possible.
Commercial inference providers serve Chinese models of comparable quality at 0.1x-0.25x. I think Anthropic realised that the game is up and they will not be able to hold the lead in quality forever so it's best to switch to value extraction whilst that lead is still somewhat there.
Yeah one PRD request of a small scope app cost me 70%
I can’t stand reading this. One article. Many words. Not written by a human.
Feels like LLMs are devolving into having a single, instantly recognizable and predictable writing style.
Don't forget that the model doesn't have an incentive to give right solution the first time. At least with Opus 4.6 after it got nerfed, it would go round in circles until you tell it to stop defrauding you and get to correct solution. That not always worked though. I found starting session again and again until less nerfed model was put on the request. Still all points to artificially make customer pay more.
For me there is no point in using Claude Opus 4.7, it's too expensive since it does not do 100% of the job. Since AI can anyway only do 90% of most tasks, I can use another model and do the remaining 15-30% myself.
Seeing this big crowd of people trying to persuade themselves or others that the ever growing hole in their pockets is totally justified and beneficial is pretty hilarious!
So intelligence has turned into a utility per Sam Altman et al., and now the same companies get to hike the price of accessing it by 20–30%, right as it’s becoming the backbone of how teams actually ship work. People are pushing out so much, so fast that last week’s output is already a blur. I’ve got colleagues who refuse to go back to writing any of this stuff by hand.
And now maintaining that pace means absorbing arbitrary price increases, shrugged off with “we were operating at a loss anyway.”
It stops being “pay to play” and starts looking more like pay just to stay in the ring, while enterprise players barely feel the hit and everyone else gets squeezed out.
Market maturing my butthole... it’s obviously a dependency being priced in real time. Tech is an utter shit show right now, compounded by the disaster of the unemployment market still reeling from the overhiring of 2020.
save up now and career pivot. pick up gardening.
Good reminder to choose model-agnostic tooling!
30% more token use, but even by their benchmarks, don't appear to have any real big successes there, and some regressions. What's the point? It doesn't do any better on the suite of obedience/compliance tests I've written for 4.6, and in some tests, got worse, despite their claim there it is better. Anecdotally, it was gobbling so many tokens on even the simplest queries I immediately shut it off and went back to 4.5.
Why release this?
here comes the rug-pull to justify the enterprise pricing...
As a regular listener of Ed Zitron this comes as absolutely no surprise. Once you understand the levels of obfuscation available to anthro / OAI you will realize that they have almost certainly hit a model plateau ~1 year ago. All benchmark improvements since have come at a high compute cost. And the model used when evaluating said benchmarks is not the same model you get with your subscription.
This is already becoming apparent as users are seeing quality degrade which implies that anthropic is dropping performance across the board to minimize financial losses.
In my “repo os” we have an adversarial agent harness running gpt5.4 for plan and implementation and opus4.6 for review. This was the clear winner in the bake-off when 5.4 came out a couple months ago.
Re-ran the bake-off with 4.7 authoring and… gpt5.4 still clearly winning. Same skills, same prompts, same agents.md.
Good lord. Reading all these comments makes me feel so much better for dumping anthropic the first time their opus started becoming dumber (circa Month ago). It feels like most people in this thread are somehow bound to Claude, even though it is alread fully enshittfied.
Talked to Claude earlier today and Opus 4.7 cost up to 35% more.
that's what i feel, going to use codex more
I noticed it was compacting more aggressively which i actually like, because i was letting sessions get really long and using them uncached (parallel sessions)
Because those braniacs added 20-30% more system prompt
Am I dumb, or are they not explaining what level thinking they're using? We all read the Anthropic blog post yesterday - 4.7 max consumes/produces an incredible number of tokens and it's not equivalent to 4.6 max; xhigh is the new "max".
I would use a service like Straion.com to avoid the forths and back. It increases token consumption but I can get things right the first time.
I was sort of hoping that the peak is something like $15 per hour of vibe help (yes I know some of you burn $15 in 12milliseconds), and that you can have last year's best or the current "nano/small" model at $1 per hour.
But it looks like it's just creeping up. Probably because we're paying for construction, not just inference right now.
here comes the rug-pull
I don't know anything about tokens. Anthropic says Pro has "more usage*", Max has 5x or 20x "more usage*" than Pro. The link to "usage limits" says "determines how many messages you can send". Clearly no one is getting billed for tokens.
This is good news. It means the bubble is popping. Bye bye VC subsidies...
The fundamental problem with these frontier model companies is that they're incentivized to create models that burn through more tokens, full stop. It's a tale as old as capitalism: you wake up every day and choose to deliver more value to your customers or your shareholders, you cannot do both simultaneously forever.
People love to throw around "this is the dumbest AI will ever be", but the corollary to that is "this is the most aligned the incentives between model providers and customers will ever be" because we're all just burning VC money for now.
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The compute is expensive, what is with this outrage? People just want free tools forever?
I can manage session cost effectively myself if forking and rewinds were first class features