Why Claude Opus 5 is Our Favorite AI Model (For Now)

**Josh** (0:00)
So, Anthropic just released a brand new model. It's not the best model, it's not the smartest model, it's not the cheapest or the fastest model. And yet, this is possibly our most favorite model release this entire year. So, what gives here? What's actually happening with Claude Opus 5? This is the new iteration after Opus 4.8, and it's just under Claude Fabel 5 Now, a lot of people see this, they're like, hmm, I'm not that excited about this model. It's just an iteration on another model that we've already had. I think you're wrong. I have some demos here, E. Jess, I know you've been playing with this since the weekend, basically, talking to Opus 5, figuring out where the edge cases are, figuring out how all of this works. The review so far is pretty great. Opus is a really fun model, and I think that's what we're going to spend this episode on packing, is just how fun it is and how to get the best out of this model, if you are someone who's new coming to Opus 5.0.

**Ejaz** (0:50)
First and foremost, this model, as you mentioned, is not the cheapest, but it's as cheap as Opus 4.8, but it's a massively different type of model. And the first characteristic that it's very good at is visual intelligence. So what I mean by this is no Claude models can actually see things. It's like when you send it an image, it breaks down the pixels and reinvents what it's looking at from a code perspective. Now, what I'm about to show you on my screen, Josh, was one-shotted over one and a half hours. It guzzled around 150,000 tokens. I didn't click anything after I sent the prompt and all of this was one-shotted. Are you ready?
Let me ask you if you recognize what you're looking at right now.

**Josh** (1:34)
Oh my goodness, this looks like home. I'm seeing the Williamsburg Bridge. Oh my God, this is the East River.

**Ejaz** (1:40)
Do you see this, bad boy?

**Josh** (1:41)
Oh wait, dude, this looks awesome.

**Ejaz** (1:44)
This is a structurally accurate, of course, graphically rendered version of the Brooklyn Bridge live with trucks at sunset. All I said to Claude was, I want you to recreate the Brooklyn Bridge, dimensionally accurate, pull the architectural renderings, everything on your own, and then I want you to span out a bunch of sub-agents, and I want you to get these agents to build different components of the Brooklyn Bridge and then review it. So take a screenshot, review it, and only feed me back the end result once you are satisfied with it. It needs to look like something out of a really cool computer game. This is what we ended up with. Here, let me show you the sunset wide shot, if you want to have a look. Let me show you a tower over here.

**Josh** (2:32)
That's fun. Okay. So it is pre-made shots for it as well.

**Ejaz** (2:35)
Yeah. Maybe I'll show you the promenade if you notice the bridge is swaying, but maybe you want to look underneath the deck, make sure it's all structurally sound. Now, imagine the different use cases for this. Obviously, there's simulations, there's games, but if you are an architect that is coming up with a brand new idea, you want to put things out in the wild, you can now have a physically and structurally accurate rendering of this model. Now, I know a lot of folks in this might be thinking, well, okay, maybe I don't want to be creating games and stuff like that. We'll get to the other good stuff. But what I want to point out is, Claude Opus can't see anything. Just want to reiterate that. It generated every single asset, every single visual that you're seeing on screen right now from scratch. It created a file on my computer. It did so with one single prompt in one and a half hours, and it only cost 100,000 tokens. It's so, so impressive.

**Josh** (3:21)
I think this is the thing that Opus 5 is really exceptional at, that a lot of people are figuring out, is when we went to Fable, we always loved the visual demos. Fable was excellent, but it's incredibly expensive. It takes a long time. It is that leading flagship model, if you want the best. Opus 5 gives you almost all of that, but with a fraction of the cost, a fraction of the time, and other really unique capabilities. So we have a few other demos, some that we found online that we didn't make ourselves, and they blew my mind, but the first one being this video that we're seeing now. So this guy on X, he said he one-shotted this game. And this game is a demo made of custom code without a single external asset. And when you look at this game, it looks like you're watching a game of Call of Duty. It's really impressive.