Agreed that Opus is stronger than Sonnet 4.5 and GPT-5 High. It's the bitter pill - bigger, more expensive models are just "smarter", even if it doesn't always show in synthetic benchmarks. Similar with o1-pro (now almost a year old, an eternity in this space) vs GPT-5 high. There's also GPT-5 Pro now, which comes at an API cost of $120/M output, and is also noticeably smarter, just like Opus.
They all like to push synthetic benchmarks for marketing, but to me there's zero doubt that both Anthropic and OpenAI are well aware that they're not representative of logical thinking and creativity.
They all like to push synthetic benchmarks for marketing, but to me there's zero doubt that both Anthropic and OpenAI are well aware that they're not representative of logical thinking and creativity.