> Sonnet 5.5 generates outputs 30%+ faster than Sonnet 5, making it our fastest Sonnet model to date.
This isn't enough. Sonnet 5 was arguably the most cost ineffective model ever released at the time of a release.
They need something competitive on speed and cost with Luna or Gemini Flash 3.8 (certainly they aren't getting to DeepSeek v4.1 Flash) - this is literally a year behind.
Anthropic continues to be a Fable/Opus only company. They're going to get left behind as workloads shift more and more to more cost-effective good-enough models. They're 10-100x behind in terms of speed and cost.
I've almost exclusively been using Anthropic for design and review, as it almost never makes sense to use any of their models for implementation (90%+ token usage) - except in the rare cases it's something too complex for a number of 10-100x cheaper models (and more importantly for me 5-10x faster, too).
For me, it's less about cost. I'm not doing anything that can't be done with a $200 subscription and minimal intelligence on what models to use. It's primarily about speed. I don't have an entire work day to give Opus / Sonnet a task that Flash can get done 95% as good in 30m.
This is YET AGAIN another Sonnet model that is just a FAR worse version of Opus at every part of the cost AND speed curve.
Hopefully they release a Haiku that actually has a reason for existing.