Anthropic’s Opus 4.8 beats version 5 for non-coding work, despite weaker benchmarks

burkov · x · 2026-07-28

Anthropic’s Opus 4.8 is described as better than version 5 for non-coding work, even though Opus 5 allegedly beats Fable 5 on benchmarks.

The post argues that this looks like a “benchmaxed” model: stronger benchmark scores, but worse real-world usefulness than 4.8 on general tasks. It also says the author still prefers Codex for coding, and is hesitant about Kimi K3 because it appears slower and more expensive, which the post attributes to China lacking enough high-end GPUs.

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