Are We Using Opus 5 Wrong?

**Brian** (0:00)
Hey, what's going on, everybody? Welcome to The Daily AI Show. Today is July 28th, 2026 And we're live. It's 10 a.m. if you're great and tell.
10 a.m. on the East Coast, 7 a.m. on the West Coast. And it's what? Tuesday. Yeah, see, I've been off, so I'm just getting around back up. Obviously, Andy's here with me. I'm Brian. And Andy, I know you've been holding it down along with Beth and Gareth. And I think that's mostly it over the last couple of days. I've been out, but I got that post. We did a short cruise as a family, my wife and I and my daughter, and I have that post cruise fuzziness of what happened with AI.
And then, you know, I've seen it. It's funny, you know, Andy, because I know you've gone and you like, you'll go to, you know, Tahoe, you'll go to different areas and things that you do and stuff like that. It's funny, like you catch the you catch the trappings, you know, over the time, like you don't miss the AI news. And it's in my, it's in my e-mail and stuff, although you can't really do that on the careers. We didn't pay for an internet package or anything. So it's like, you get these little, like, the tops of the waves, right? And you know, it's like, okay, but I know there's a lot more going on, but of course, I don't know what's being out. I don't know exactly what you guys all covered. So I really tried to focus my research on last 24 hours stuff, but even in doing that research, Andy, I felt like it was stuff that I was already at least aware of, whether it be Opus 5, or it was still talking about the ChatGPT model breaking free, and that whole story that happened when I get Facebook was like that was several days ago, and it just goes to show you that some of these stories really do stick around. They have a long tail on that, whereas these other ones in AI, as we talk a lot of times, will just flash and they'll be gone within a day. So I want to throw it to you first, obviously, because you've been here. You know, what's the latest stuff? I mean, obviously, you probably talked about some of these other stories. If not, we can certainly get into them. But what's like the latest or at least the latest developments you're seeing from some of these stories that are out there right now?

**Andy** (2:02)
Well, first, I'll say that as you sense, there's really a kind of trough in the volume of news that's coming out, that's fresh and exciting. Yeah. And so there's not a lot that goes beyond the afterglow of Opus 5's release. And I say afterglow because there are a lot of critiques I've seen out there about the character and style of Opus 5
But there's also some major pronouncements that, hey, this is the best model you can use right now. Forget Fable 5, forget the others. This is at a relatively low cost. This is the state of the art model for most everything that you need to do.

**Brian** (2:49)
What I've loved about it too, I'm sorry, just to comment on that.

**Andy** (2:51)
No, yeah.

**Brian** (2:53)
I mean, there's zero downside, right? It costs exactly the same amount as 4.8. I've been loving 4.8 for quite some time. In fact, as we went through those last couple of weeks, you get Fable 5, and I'm like, yeah, no, you can definitely see a difference from Fable 5 But then when I lost access and then you go back to 4.8, you go, yeah, no, I think I'm like kind of, it kind of reassured me that I was able to do just a lot at 4.8, and now here comes 5
Because I've been on vacation, I haven't had an opportunity, I haven't touched it at all, so I haven't seen any personal, I have no personal antidotes from this or whatever, but it's literally half the price of Fable. I mean, across the board, it's literally across all areas is half the price of Fable, and I'm hearing what you're saying, which is it's a damn good model. It's a really good model. So anyway, I didn't want to cut you off by anything.

**Andy** (3:39)
Yeah. So I was very happy to forget about buying credits for Fable 5 when Opus 4.8 was still available, and I was going to just rely on that because it's damn good.
Yeah. Now, Opus 5 is way, way better than that, like really leapfrog 4.8. So it's really at the top of the charts in many respects. So there's that news. And then there's also a lot of ongoing discussion about the Open Alliance, the letter that's been signed by many, many companies with the exception of Google, OpenAI and Anthropic. The paper says we need to preserve and protect an open model ecosystem in AI in the United States, and in the world globally. So it's an appeal to the government not to put any restrictions on open weight models, including the open weight models from China, because that seems to be the knee-jerk reaction, is, oh, we're being threatened by, quote, dumping by Chinese developed models that may be a function of their distillation of our own investments in AI. So we're going to put restrictions on those, but those restrictions would necessarily, I think unless it's just a bald-faced block on any kind of Chinese availability here in the United States, it would impact and deleteriously, it would hurt the, yeah.