This is their hosted-only model, not an open weight model like they’ve become known for. They got a lot of good publicity for their open weight model releases, which was the goal. The hard part is pivoting from an open weight provider to being considered as a competitor to Claude and ChatGPT. Initial reactions are mostly anger from everyone who didn’t realize that the play along was to give away the smaller models as advertising, not because they were feeling generous.

Comparing to Opus 4.5 instead of the current 4.6 and other last-gen models is clearly an attempt to deceive, which isn’t winning them any points either.

I think there is a moderately large market for models like this that aren’t quite SOTA level but can be served up much cheaper. I don’t know how successful they’ll be in the race to the bottom in this market niche, though. Most users of cheap API tokens are not loyal to any brand and will change providers overnight each time someone releases a slightly better model.

> I think there is a moderately large market for models like this that aren’t quite SOTA level but can be served up much cheaper.

There isn't, pretty much everyone wants the best of the best.

> There isn't, pretty much everyone wants the best of the best.

For direct user interaction or coding problems, perhaps. But as API calls get cheaper, it becomes more realistic to use them for completely automated workflows against data-sets, or as sub-agents called from expensive SOTA models.

For example, in Claude, using Opus as an orchestrator to call Sonnet sub-agents, is a popular usage "hack." That only gets more powerful, as the Sonnet equivalent model gets cheaper. Now you can spawn entire teams of small specialized sub-agents with small context windows but limited scope.