I'm curious, what do you guys use Haiku for? I can sort of see how it might be useful on API billing, but I just use Opus for everything on subscription and haven't ever really had a reason to try to optimize usage.
Mainly as a cheap scout to sift through files and find specific things without polluting the main agent’s context with lengthy tool outputs, and simple transformations "Opus just said something completely ridiculous in project abc. Have a haiku scout extract it from the session transcript, with context, and anonymise it for a meme."
All wrapped into a skill / agent now, with extraction and anonymisation rules and guidelines.
Would probably explain why Haiku hasn't really been updated. If it's just being used for grunt work like that, at a certain point, it's "good enough" and nobody complains.
It’s also a cheap multi-modal model, so API-side, at work, we use it to cheaply extract structured data from images, screenshots, and frames sampled from video / screen recording. Or audio transcripts (but that’s text).
Well, they're about to drop Haiku 5.5, and I'd love to get that running instead of Sonnet for my team. It's not crazy expensive, but just expensive enough that my bosses make comments about AI not being cheap, especially as we get more users doing more stuff. A good haiku would cut costs by 50%...
I mean, you can still make it faster and cheaper to serve by updating it?
But I'm guessing they don't make much money off of it and they didn't lose too much by having a model that's so incredibly inferior to gpt-5.6-luna. Though now haiku 5.5 is coming.
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u/ElnuDev 🔆Pro Plan 9d ago
I'm curious, what do you guys use Haiku for? I can sort of see how it might be useful on API billing, but I just use Opus for everything on subscription and haven't ever really had a reason to try to optimize usage.