The pricing isn't absurd, but I also think this one will stay on the shelf. Their Claude 3.0 lineup was so good:
Haiku as a very cheap and fast option for low complexity stuff. Sonnet for most people and their fairly advanced problems. Opus as a very expensive, slow but very capable model. Haiku 3 was 12x cheaper and Opus 5x more expensive than Sonnet. This made a lot of sense to me and I used every single for for different tasks.
With 3.5, that's a different story. They're clearly running into GPU limits and dropping Opus for now is a reasonable thing to do. Sonnet has improved so much and OpenAI is behind them anyway. But this move on Haiku is stupid on so many levels.
Their lineup is down to two models, which are closer than ever in performance and price. It's like "Sonnet" and "Almost Sonnet" and at a 3x price difference, I'll stick with the OG. For a lower cost model, I'm going to stick with GPT-4o-mini.
Also, people make connections to products through names and not benchmark results. It's great that Haiku has improved so much, but it's still Haiku. We know models get better, but increasing prices 4x for a new version of an existing one doesn't feel nice.
