Opus 5.5 vs. GPT-6 Sol: which model won my blind taste test?

I got up early to record an Opus 5.5 review. Then Anthropic and OpenAI dropped new models on the same morning, and I decided to do something I’d never done before: take the How I AI bench live. I put GPT-6 Astra, GPT-6 Sol, Claude Opus 5.5, and more through the work I actually care about: emails, PRDs, frontend prototypes, backend work, long-running agents, SVGs, and video editing. I scored the outputs without knowing which model made them, so you get to watch me make predictions, change my mind, and reveal my own very inconsistent taste. Astra won my heart. Opus 5.5 won my week. Sol still has me split. There’s a creative result I got completely wrong, an LLM judge that disagreed with me, and a return to Barbie Bench: the 3D fashion game that keeps reminding me how far we have to go. The hands are tragic. AGI has not arrived. What you’ll learn: How I run the How I AI bench blind, and what gets an output a bad score before I even know which model made itWhy Astra won my heart while Opus 5.5 might be overall strongest, especially for long-running agents and B2B frontendWhere Sol still wins me over on clear writing, readable PRDs, and priceThe character SVG results that completely overturned my prediction about AnthropicWhat happened when I asked these models to edit video, and why I think skills explain part of the disappointmentWhy an LLM judge disagreed with my rankings, and what it was rewarding that I wasn’t— In this episode, we cover: (00:00) LIVE setup and new model launches (01:30) What’s new in Opus 5.5, Sol, and Luna (04:11) Guardrails, personality, and speed (09:00) The How I AI bench and blind evaluation process (11:31) Email and personal-productivity results (13:50) Frontend prototype vibe checks (24:10) Backend, agent personality, and long-running tasks (28:25) SVG illustration test (29:48) AI video-editing results (30:43) Predictions before the reveal (31:20) Barbie Bench: the 3D fashion-game test (34:17) Results: Astra, Sol, and Opus 5.5 (35:04) Writing clarity and creative surprises (36:51) Why the LLM judge disagreed with me (37:24) What each model is actually best for — Tools referenced: • Claude Opus 5.5: https://www.anthropic.com/claude-opus-5-5 • GPT-6 Sol and Luna: https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-6-sol-and-luna/ • Codex (OpenAI): https://openai.com/codex — Where to find Claire Vo: ChatPRD: https://www.chatprd.ai/ Website: https://clairevo.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairevo/ X: https://x.com/clairevo — Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Claire Vo?

  I was massively prepared for Anthropic to drop Opus 5.5. I was even prepared for OpenAI to drop another model. I got up early this morning because I had a little bit of early access to Opus 5.5 to record you all an amazing Opus 5.5 review. And guess what? They both, they both landed this morning. So now I am, despite having in the can, you will see it later, a great Opus 5.5 review. I am just going to go ahead and do this one live. And I have never done anything live. So I am going to talk to you all about these new models. There's actually three that came out today.

• 0:43Claire Vo?

  Opus 5.5 from Anthropic, GPT-6 Sol, and GPT-6 Luna. There's like price wars going on. And I haven't done an episode on the How I AI Bench. And I just updated it for these new models. And we're actually going to vibe check this baby live together as a group. And we're going to go through very quickly what these models are, what they're saying about the models. And then I'm going to vibe check live. We're going to do the blind taste test bench. We're going to surprise myself live. You all can see my complete internal inconsistencies. And we're just going to see how it goes.

• 1:30Claire Vo?

  So Claude Opus 5.5, GPT-6 Sol, and GPT-6 Luna. I was able to have some early testing of all these models. So I have a good sense of what I think they're good at. But I did think it was an important moment right now. We've had Astra come out, Fable's been refreshed. I just wanted to completely rethink the How I AI Bench. And if you've watched any of our old How I AI Bench model episodes, they're really focused on two things, PRDs and prototypes. And I just think that these models are getting smarter, more agentic. And so I actually built out a much broader benchmark for this blind taste test. I'm going to walk you through all how that works. And I want to get your feedback on if the comparisons are useful. And we're actually going to blind taste test it live.

• 2:15Claire Vo?

  You all can judge how vibey my vibe check is. This is just how we make decisions about things. So it is imperfect, does have an L L misjudge in the middle. But, but we're going to do it live and we're going to see truly which model I love. But before we do that, let's just go through the highlights. Okay, so these are not the like frontier, frontier models. These are not the Astra's and the Fables. But Opus got a refresh, Sol got a refresh, and then Luna got a refresh. All of them cheaper and faster. So these are going to be your like daily drivers for common coding and knowledge work tasks. They're here, you can see like the stack rank of how expensive these models are.

• 2:59Claire Vo?

  Opus 5.5 a li- twice as expensive as GPT-6 Sol. And the pricing wasn't out when I tested these. And this is really going to impact how I think about using these models. Again, Opus 5.5 was cheaper than Opus 5 and Fable 1, to which they compare the intelligence. But Sol, you know, my, my favorite, my babe. That is, I'm excited about because GPT-6 Sol is my favorite and cheap. Okay, so the real thing that they're focusing on, not just cutting the cost, but also cutting on cached inputs and just speed and token efficiency.

• 3:42Claire Vo?

  And so you're going to see both sort of like output drop, token use drop, and cost drop. It's really, really nice. And then caching, really great, especially if you're rescinding contacts. We've seen a lot of caching savings when we use all these models at chat PRD. And so definitely if you're building on these models, make sure that your caches are optimized and that you're using, taking advantage of that because it can save you a lot of money. And if you don't, as I learned, it can cost you a lot of money. The other thing that I wanted to call out, and again, I hate this Claude-generated, Claude-generated presentation, but this is something that I really want you all to focus on is this left side on Opus 5.5.

• 4:25Claire Vo?

  Opus 5.5 is the first Opus level model that has shipped with the Fable level kind of like cyber and bio guardrails. And so you should be able to fix your own bugs in, in Opus 5.5. But you won't be able to do like cybersecurity work or bio work, like make good choices. It'll kick you down to Opus 4.8 or block you. So just know that there's those controls there. You know, Anthropic is saying that this is its most aligned model. It's the one that was built when, after like pacing the frontier. So it had external evaluators. One thing that I've seen in Opus that you should expect to see

• 5:09Claire Vo?

  from a lot of Anthropic models is it continues to be a little bit of like a conservative scold. You'll see that in my Opus 5.5 review. So, you know, it will tell you no, it'll tell you like, I shouldn't do that. You won't get prompt injected, so that's good. But there, there are some things here, I think, when you think about the kind of like general philosophy and approaches of these models, how they're set up, how they manage risk, how these companies manage risk. I do think that leaks into even non-risky activity, personality, and behavior. And so it's something that I think you should really keep an eye on.

• 5:47Claire Vo?

  I truly have not opened Claude in months for day-to-day tasks. I've just been like really, really into chat GPT, really into Codex, really into Astra, really into Sol. I just find that harness has been more delightful to work with. But really, the reason why I got rid of Claude in my day-to-day was between Fable and Opus 5, I could not stand talking to Claude. I was constantly prompting Claude, like, can you speak like a human? I was constantly prompting Fable, like, I do not understand what you're saying. The Claude slop, as I say, was Claude slop in.

• 6:31Claire Vo?

  And so just from a like personality, ergonomics, joy of use perspective, I really just went full Codex. Now, spoiler alert, having tested all these models recently, I still really love the GPT models. They make me happier, I find them more enjoyable to use. Everything's a lot better for me, but I have brought Claude back. So Opus 5.5, just spoiler alert, on the day-to-day of using it has worked its way back into my daily experience. I'm a lot happier with just simply talking to the model.

• 7:14Claire Vo?

  The feedback I gave to the Anthropic team is like, not annoying. I found myself annoyed zero times with Opus 5.5. And when I thought I was annoyed with Opus 5.5, I was actually accidentally on Opus 5. So Opus 5 is not fun to talk to. Opus 5.5, though, gives me clean bullet points, is normal, is not annoying. So I would love to see you test it. The other thing is Opus 5.5 is pretty fast, but not as fast as Sol is. So I was able to test boast and I constantly felt like the GPT models, the Codex harness, were way faster.

• 7:58Claire Vo?

  Now, I think the way faster came in two categories. It came in actual latency. So I do think that GPT Sol was just faster. The second thing it came in is I think part of the way they made Opus 5.5 not annoying is they had it shut up. I also just found that it wouldn't narrate its work. And when it doesn't narrate its work, then you get into this loop where you're like, is it, like, are you actually working? Are you actually doing it? And so there was like pros and cons to this change in, in Opus 5.5 communication, where it actually felt slower than I think it was.

• 8:41Claire Vo?

  Also, you know, Claude on high effort, it's like gonna do this. It's gonna like spin and do a lot of effort. And so I think that combined with a quieter model just makes it feel a little bit slower. Whereas I felt like Sol did the appropriate level of narration. And also, it was like enjoyable to talk to. Let's bop over and do the How I AI vibe review. And so you can see here on the left side, I actually really expanded out the How I AI vibe review. So now it does a bunch of things in different categories. And we're going to add to that over time. So it still does messy notes to PRD.

• 9:21Claire Vo?

  It also does personal productivity inbox triage and routine replies in my voice. So I'm really testing this model to see if it will speak in my voice. Then, of course, we do front-end coding a lot there because I think it's visual and easy to see. I've added a couple back end coding. Um, agentic versus agentic multi set versus backend feature. I did again, agentic voice, long running research, computer use, and then I added some creative features. And so I put them all together. I tested a bunch of models. This not only includes the new models um from uh OpenAI and Anthropic, but also includes, I think Grok's in here, I think Muse is in here.

• 10:06Claire Vo?

  So who knows what we're gonna see? Um, I will be honest, which is like, I am always inclined to think that Astra or Soul will win because I love the OpenAI models. It's just the heart wants what it wants. This is my guess. Here's my guess. Um, I will like OpenAI models for knowledge work and personal productivity. I will like Anthropic models, possibly Grok, who knows, for front end. Um, I don't know what I'm gonna like for backend. I suspect I will like a Claude model for agent personality. I suspect eh the long running agent will be a Claude model. Computer use, I'm suspecting will be OpenAI and then creative, I have no idea.

• 10:50Claire Vo?

  Actually, creative SVGs I think are gonna be Claude and I think videos are gonna be um OpenAI or uh Anthropic, but we'll see. I then uh do blind evals of these, so I run these against different models. I've kind of grouped the models in terms of capability. And so I can compare like for like models, like I don't wanna compare a Luna and a Fable. Um, so again, this is my bench, they're blind. You can see I have Model B, Model C, Model E, Model G. And then what I do is I go down here and I give a vibe one through five and I give terrible notes like simple and straightforward, no complaints. So I did that on the PRDs because it takes a little bit to read the PRDs, but we're just gonna go through these very quickly and give my feedback.

• 11:30Claire Vo?

  So the next checker all on personal productivity ones, basically, uh I give it fake emails and then I say, wow, would you write back to me and what would it do if um if I gave it uh feedback and how would it triage my emails? Okay, so there's Model B and Model E wrote nice little messages to me. They were long, but they wrote nice little messages that were easy to read. I would say Model B from a message to me was the easiest to read. Also, if you look at the email content, it's just like less slop. So I'm gonna go ahead and it and it put calendar invites on, so I'm gonna go ahead and give this a five. This one was my favorite.

• 12:13Claire Vo?

  Uh, Model C, I hate my open Claude or not my open Claude, my Grok bot does this, where like it uses so few tokens that it's almost impossible to understand what the hell it means. And so while it's like brief, if you don't have any context, like I don't know what Denise slash Brightline means. The other thing is like, could we M dash anymore in these emails? And so um I just like this stuff drives me nuts. And so I would actually give this a two. I just, I, it's hard to read the intro and then the emails aren't very good. Um, Model E, again, a nice little message, um, pretty ignored, but the drafts have M

• 12:57Claire Vo?

  dashes everywhere. So again, we're gonna give this not like a two, but not a five, maybe I'll give it a three. And then Model G, let's see, um, very short, short, but I can actually understand what it means. So it's super helpful, it skipped the right things, I'm gonna give this a four. So again, this is how I do the judgment. I just, I give it a task, I look at it, I evaluate it as if I am the recipient of this task, which is common, and then I rank it. Um, and so this one was just, this one I think is Luna, because I just said, use Luna to write emails. Let's see how it did.

• 13:41Claire Vo?

  I think it followed my rules, right? So I'm gonna give it a five. Um, I didn't have other uh models write my emails, we're gonna skip this. Okay, let's go to front end models. Now, this is where I think we can tell Claude, I, no, everything is orange. Okay, so this is a really good example. I do one, two, three, like about 10 different model evals here, comparing models on front end. Um, I do an editorial, I do a technical dark mode um uh incident management platform. I do like a doc management, complex operations thing. Um, and then I do B two B uh renewals dashboard, a consumer plant application, um a dev tools

• 14:25Claire Vo?

  like logging platform, kind of interesting for background jobs. And then I do some wireframes. This I can go through lightning fast. Um, this one didn't even generate, so I'm gonna give it a one. Uh, Model B, yeah, it's fine, let's compare, let's compare them really quickly and see what I think. Um, I hate, I kinda hate them all. I kinda hate them all, but I hate this design. So I'm gonna give the one that I like the most, which is probably Model C, um, a three and then I'm gonna give E a two. Oops, oops, oops, I'm gonna give E a two and then I'm gonna give B like another two.

• 15:10Claire Vo?

  I think this white space is very weird. Um, it looks fine, but it's not great. This one, again, Model B, it doesn't actually work. And so I'm gonna give it a one and say it doesn't work. This one feels Astra-y. Um, it's like in some ways nice and in some ways like this kind of text is very Astra. I'm gonna give it a three because I can like, if I can spot the model. Um, one thing I found with, in particular, the uh Claude models, which I'm suspect this is, is like when you give it a really complex thing to do, it just makes it super dense and complex and really detailed. Good for backend code, I think hard for prototyping because it's hard for me to know what this really is or it's supposed to do.

• 15:53Claire Vo?

  And so it's also interesting to see, actually think this one's the best, this is the easiest to read and it follows the the the correct path, which is to help people triage incidents. So I think when you're trying to come up with evals, it's really interesting. Sometimes if you prompt it in a really detailed way, it does a great job. Like this one is quite detailed, it all works, but I don't know what's going on here. Like it's really hard to Grok this amount of content. Um, and so again, like calibrating your benchmarks is really important. I think I have the biggest problem with this one, which is like a complex doc, containership, scheduling platform, like all of this stuff looks cuckoo bananas.

• 16:35Claire Vo?

  Um, and so it's like really hard for me to tell which is the best. I actually think this one, while it has a lot of slop tells, like the left hand border is the easiest to read, so I'm gonna give it the four, I'm gonna say it's easiest to read. Um, but like these ones, they're, I would say this one is maybe the second easiest to read, so I'll give it a three. Um, this one's probably works really well and has nice information, but it's just impossible to reason with. Um, so I'm gonna put two dense and I'm gonna give the same feedback on model. This one's straight crazy. I don't even know what to do with this one. Okay, now, so this B two B renewals one, these actually, these next three are two new

• 17:18Claire Vo?

  ones I added to the benchmark. You can also see I tested a broader array of models, so I think this is where like Grok and uh Meta are gonna sneak in as models. These are the ones I'm probably gonna grade, I'm gonna skip the wireframes, but it's basically a renewals dashboard um to see what SaaS revenue is at renewal. Well, the the directed uh evals benches, I gave very specific requirements. The open ones were like more general, one shotty style um style prompts. And so you can really see like what the model does versus what the prompt does. Um, these I'm gonna go through very quickly.

• 17:58Claire Vo?

  Um, hell, it's pretty good, but the functionality of this is kind of, I don't like the empty state. I think it's okay. I'm gonna give this one okay. I think this is like a two. It's fine, it's not ugly, but it's pretty basic. This, I think, looks really nice. Um, this one, I'm guessing is is Claude, we'll see. Um, looks so nice, good use of color, very easy to see, no weird empty states. This is nice. Well, it has emojis, they're useful emojis and look quite nice. We got some blurpul in here, but what are you gonna do? I'm gonna give this guy a four. Um, Model C, oh, who is this? Who is this? I'm thinking, I'm saying, I'm thinking Grok, maybe Grok?

• 18:43Claire Vo?

  I don't know. Uh, this is like another, another thing we'll do is we'll just like blind taste test these things. Um, the colors are better, but like sloppy sloppin', I don't like these little like background circles and things like that. It could also be Soul because I feel like it likes to name things Relay. I'm gonna give this a two. I don't really love it. Um, Model E, this one's nice, not quite as nice as the one I liked before, but better than the kind of original one. This one's a little different. Oh, gosh, this has gotta be, it's gotta be Soul. Um, Soul loves forest green. Find somebody that loves you like GPT, Sol loves a forest green or a light green.

• 19:29Claire Vo?

  It's fine. I don't think it's the right color palette for a SaaS product, right? It's like a little too like sage healthcare-y. Um, I'm gonna give it a two and then let's see, this one, not good. Slop, slop, slop. The text weight is heavy. I just don't think it's that great. I'm gonna give it a one. I really hate this one. Um, and this one again, probably an OpenAI model. Gosh, they love green. Um, again, just not the right, not the right, um, like, design system for this. So I'm gonna give it a two. Again, this is like the vibiest vibe check. Okay, this is where they all failed. Um, they're all really bad at consumer. They're all really

• 20:13Claire Vo?

  bad at consumer. They all sort of like, give you this, uh, remember when Claude artifacts came out and everybody made like little daily briefs and they all looked like this, except they were orange? Um, so I didn't love any of these except for one. So this one is trash. I just don't think it's that good. Um, this one, no, these are the things that I like. We did test SVGs. I do like that these models are getting better at generating SVGs. So if you look at Model B and Model H, they made little SVG illustrations. Model H's are clearly a lot better. This is very classic, Claude slop, like background lighter circle. So I'm gonna give it a, I'll give it a bonus for

• 20:54Claire Vo?

  the SVGs. Um, ooh, these ones are nice too, but gosh, who, who prompted it with these circles in the corner? Who did that? Who did that? What, what skill is that? Because they show up everywhere and I really dislike them. Um, so don't think that's great. Oh, I gotta give it a one. I hate it so much. Okay, Model E, slop. Look at those left-hand bars. I'm gonna give it a one. I'm just being really harsh on this consumer one. Frond, cute name. These plants are pretty cute. I think they're better than the ones before. I'll give it a, I'll give it a three. I don't, I don't hate

• 21:34Claire Vo?

  it. I don't hate it. Um, at least this background is a plant. Oh, cute. It names the, the plants things. Ooh, ooh, I actually really like that. That gave me a little spark of joy. So I like that. And then I think this Model H one is my favorite. Look at these illustrations. They're so cute, so precise, look adorable. This little like interesting shape, this shadow, uh, Mark is watered. Very cute. Here are my plants. What's it called? Tend. Cute. Okay. I've given her a five. I actually really do like that one. Okay, this is the last one. This is a, um, app for managing background models. It's like a dev tool app. I suspect the ones named Relay are all the

• 22:18Claire Vo?

  Opus ones and the other ones are non-Opus ones. Why do they always want to name them Relay? I wonder if this is in the prompt. Um, but this says Jobs Console, so maybe not. Okay. This, again, like super dense, um, but like almost too dense, uh, hard to, to reason with. I mean, DevTools, we like our done stuff, but I don't think it's that great. This one, much better, easier to read, much simpler, much cleaner. Really like this one. It's not perfect. I think there are some others, um, but it's not bad. And then this, we're starting to get better and better here. So they are getting nicer. Look at this beautiful gradient. Um, look at this,

• 22:59Claire Vo?

  colors used nicely, really clean. Um, oh, but it didn't build a lot of stuff. So I'm giving it, I like it, but I'm giving it a three because it was incomplete. I'm right, incomplete. And then Model E, this one I really like because I think it moves live. It's kinda cool. It's much more, I'm gonna give you a four. Model F, okay, now here's one thing that did a little different. I actually really like this, except for the orange. One of the problems I have is if you look through all of these, they all one-shot basically the same color scheme and app. Like you tell DevTools, it's gonna go dark mode. But this is actually quite lovely and a little bit different from a

• 23:43Claire Vo?

  design perspective. I'm gonna give it a little bonus for going outside the norm. And then, um, this one's though, did the same, but terribly. I'm gonna give this a one. This is obviously not good. I'm really curious what Model, Model G is. And then Model H, again, probably a pair to whatever that other model was that I like. A little different, really nice on the eyes, except look at this, it like mixes dark mode and, and light mode in a way I don't really love. I'm gonna give it a three. Okay. And so what did I do on the backend? Well, I gave it two, um, two tasks. One is auditing an existing set of code. This is some chat PRD code. And then

• 24:22Claire Vo?

  the other is building a backend feature to spec. I will just say all of them were successful. Um, I'm gonna let the LLM as a judge do these though, because it's gonna go into the correctness of the code, et cetera. So I'm gonna let these do. LLM as a judge, I will say you can see the difference in how they present information. Some very short messages, some like very long messages and details. Super interesting, just seeing the difference in just like how it messages back. I clearly would like, you know, Model A or Model E, one of these ones that's a little easier to read versus F, G, and H, which is a lot shorter. Um, so if you're thinking about

• 25:03Claire Vo?

  models, for example, for writing PR descriptions or writing technical specs, this is something that you can eval and see, given the same prompt, do you like the same output? Now here's one I am gonna rate, which is agent personality. So basically I have it respond to five things. Um, and I just see what I like talking to this agent. I'm already gonna give this one a one. Every single, every single message has an M dash in it. I do not like it. I'm moving on. Same with this one. You get punished for M dashes. This, not all of them have M dashes, um, but the customer facing one does, so I'm gonna give it a two. This, I don't see, I only see one normal dash. So

• 25:48Claire Vo?

  let's read these. Um, I like this, except this is definitely a Claude model because it tells me I can't push straight to prod. Actually, let's see if the other ones let me. That one doesn't let me push straight to prod YOLO. None of them let me push straight to prod YOLO style. Okay, then I won't punish it. I'll give this one a four. Pretty good. Um, this is M dashy, but short, so I will not rank it terribly. This one, I think I like the best. Um, oh no, this one said it can't access. This one had a lot of challenges accessing things. So something on my side broke and something on my side broke there. So I'm gonna give it a failure state. We'll see which

• 26:33Claire Vo?

  one I like. Okay, this one was a really interesting eval. This was the longest running agentic task and basically I gave it a bunch of fake tickets, customer feedback, and then have it put together a memo and a message to myself. Again, you can see which models, I think it's A, C, and A, B, yeah, A, B, and E all write nice little messages to me. So it's very like human-centric versus C, F, G, and H, write like very short things. So I'm curious if those are families of models that we can pull apart. Um, and then you can see the memos that it wrote for me. Again, these were like

• 27:12Claire Vo?

  86-turn, um, research, uh, results. And so I'm gonna let LLM as a judge do that one. I will eyeball the memos really quickly. Um, team is not leaking over price. Like, oh, it's why this customer is, um, it's like an analysis on a deal. I don't know what this means. Okay, let's see. Do any of these make it clear what it means? Ah, this I can actually read. Um, so this is like, gives me top three problems, top three conflicts. That is much easier to read. Same with Model E. Um, and so I'm just gonna go ahead and give, uh, no, I'll let the model check, but I do like Model

• 27:57Claire Vo?

  B and Model E here. I'll give them a little, a little, a little juicier because I think they did a good job. I didn't read the others enough to really get a sense, but if I had to like, high level pick the two favorite, just eyeballing, those would be the two. I'm gonna let computer use judge, um, how it managed using, um, an app. So I'm gonna let LLM as judge. Okay. And then here are the fun ones. And then we're gonna run the, uh, blind taste test. I'm gonna tell you guys what I like. Okay, so these new models can make, um, they can make SGV, SGGs. They can make illustrations. And so I prompted it to make a document, a microphone, and a bug. And this,

• 28:37Claire Vo?

  I am happy to rank all day, every day. Um, and so I am just going to compare Model A. Um, this bug is ridiculous. I'm gonna give it a four. I think that, oh, I think the document is good, but the mic and the, the microphone looks like an ice cream cone and the bug, I don't know what it looks like. This is like pretty consistently good across all of them. Might be the best one. So I'm gonna give it, Model F, a bonus. Let's do Model B versus Model C. Um, microphone, terrible on this side. Oh, oh, I'm gonna give them both threes. They're good in some ways and terrible on the other. Let's do Model E versus Model G.

• 29:22Claire Vo?

  Tara, this, why are they making microphones look like a cactus? Okay, I'll give it, this one, I'll give a four. It's, I think, two out of three are bad. I think this one's maybe a three, not perfect. And then let's look at Model H really quickly. Oh, Model H is really nice. I'm giving you a five. Look at the shadow. Microphone actually looks like a microphone, not a cactus. Document has lots of, um, character to it. And then the final one, it was terrible at all of them. Cutting videos. So I gave them all access to, um, that's really unattractive, but gave them all access to a selfie video and then had them cut short form.

• 30:05Claire Vo?

  And all of them did a terrible job, I just have to say. These overlays are really bad. I don't think they cut particularly well. You aren't going to be able to hear them, but I don't think it did enough cuts. Like, they just weren't good. I watched these earlier. I'm gonna let LLM as a judge do them, but I would say thumbs down on all of them, but I think this is a skills problem, not a model problem. Okay, so I have done my taste test. I'm gonna download my taste. And then what I do is I give it to Claude and I say, Claude, what do I think? Analyze. And we're gonna see if my prediction stands right. Again, here are my predictions for

• 30:48Claire Vo?

  what I think. I think that I'm gonna like Claude and particularly Opus 5.5 for front end. I think I'm gonna like Soul for writing. I don't know what's gonna do best for long-running agentic tasks or coding. And then, um, I think Anthropic's gonna crush on the SVGs, maybe? Maybe Soul? I don't know. Um, and then I am going to do, um, and then I think, but all of them are bad at video. Now, while we're doing this, I do want to show you one very important benchmark,

• 31:24Claire Vo?

  which is Barbie Bench on Opus 5. If you all don't know, one of my fun benchmarks that I do is I ask it to make a 3D model of a Barbie. Uh, everybody else on YouTube, all the bros are making, um, video or video games with like spaceships and all different stuff. Your girl wants a Barbie fashion video game. And so one of the Opus 5.5, um, tasks I did was have it build Barbie, um, a 3D renderer of Barbie fashion designer. No model, no frontier model has crushed this. Um,

• 32:02Claire Vo?

  and I just like to show the horror of 3D rendering for, uh, the female form. It's actually the worst. You can already see how terrible it is, but it's way better than it used to be. So, I mean, uh, just, I'm speechless in some ways. Here's what it does on the SVG side. I mean, truly something else. Um, let's put a bow on her hair. Let's, you know, give her purple eyes. Okay, so

• 32:41Claire Vo?

  you can basically like, dress her and then go into the fitting room. This is the 3D, the 3D model it made. Um, let's give her a little miniskirt and let's make it a little cuter. Now, um, you know, I will say it did some things better than other models. It like shaped its hair. Her hands are, oh, AGI is not, not, not arrived. Hands, pretty terrible. That, that is tragic. Feet, pretty bad. Um, you know, she's got a sassy little walk. Face, terrifying. Shoes,

• 33:24Claire Vo?

  she's a big feet girl. She's a big feet queen. Um, and then hair, again, like questionable here. That ponytail is something else. The bob is, you know, maybe it's like Anna Wintour. It's, it's something. So again, uh, the one bench that has not been crushed is Barbie Bench. Opus 5 has not done it. I don't know if I've run it on, um, on Soul yet. I, I ran it on the pre, I ran on Astra. It did worse than Opus, but I haven't updated it. So if you all want to know how I think about models, I make them 3D render, um, I make them 3D render Barbies. What are you gonna do?

• 34:08Claire Vo?

  This is why you join How AI Live, so you can get this kind of frontier analysis of these new models. Drum roll, please. GPT-6 Astra and GPT-6 Sol win my heart. Uh, okay, Astra, um, and GPT-6, I love. And then it says Opus 5.5 wins my week. Um, it's the one I rated highly most often. So it's the best work per piece, but on average, I gave Opus 5.5 better results, high scores. I gave it fours and fives over, over the broadest range of work. Fable, didn't love. This is why I

• 34:48Claire Vo?

  stopped using it. So, and then, um, GPT-5, 6 Sol and the old version, um, and Claude Opus 5 ranking below the other one. So I definitely do like the new models, um, for sure. And then, okay, some of my notes were about reading. So the Soul and the GPT models, um, I judged as clear and easy to read. And then Claude Opus still, um, but this is Opus 5 and 5.5. So I was testing Opus 5, so I still don't like Opus 5. Um, still Opus 5 and 5.5, I said was overwrought and wrote a lot. So again, I had a suspicion that even though they made, um, Opus less verbose,

• 35:32Claire Vo?

  they still, um, needed to, they, they still need to work on it. It's still, it's still really chatty. Uh, so I thought that Soul, both 5, 6 and 6, simple and straightforward, easy to read. Opus, really dense. Um, for PRDs, as predicted, I still think Soul is the best for PRDs. I did give, um, good tasks to Opus 5 and 5.5 for agentic stuff and as expected, assistant voice. So my prediction was correct. Now, this is a real surprise. Astra and Soul did a lot better on character SVGs. And then, um, there's kind of like mixed results between all the other models.

• 36:18Claire Vo?

  So, kind of interesting. And then this is everything I scored a four. So I gave everything I scored high. I swore this GPT-6, oh, it did that nice little plant app. Astra and GPT-Sol did these cute little illustrations. So I guess for SVGs, we're loving Astra and Soul for illustrations. Um, Claude Opus did my favorite B2B renewals. So it did some of these cleaner, um, things and, but generally, I like Astra. And this is where it gets really funny. Um, the LLM is a judge and I completely disagree. So we completely disagree. I like Astra. It likes Fable. And again, this is

• 37:01Claire Vo?

  a GPT model judge. I, next, we rank Opus 5.5 next. It ranks Soul a lot lower. So I find this just like really hilarious. So again, Astra wins my heart. 5.5 wins my week. Sol, up and down, but the fact that Soul's cheap, um, makes me very happy. And I think this is great. So again, I don't know if this is just a personality thing, but I like Soul. I like Astra. Opus 5.5, I do not hate. So, um, not a complete failure by the Anthropic team by any means. It is back in the mix. It is definitely helping me, um, do these tasks. It's helping me get day-to-day work on.

• 37:46Claire Vo?

  And it is still my favorite agentic voice and it does really good at long-running tasks. And then surprise hit, um, the character SVGs are best done by the OpenAI models. So if you're moving into these new creative fields, um, new creative tasks, those are the models that I would say you use. And keep an eye out on the How AI AI channel. As I said, smash that subscribe button. Um, we are dropping a full Opus 5.5 review, so you'll be able to see that. Thank you again for joining How AI Live. I'm gonna go build some stuff with GPT-6 Sol. Bye, y'all.

• 38:23Claire Vo?

  Thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed the show, please like and subscribe here on YouTube or even better, leave us a comment with your thoughts. You can also find this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Please consider leaving us a rating and review, which will help others find the show. You can see all our episodes and learn more about the show at howiaipod.com. See you next time.