{"slug": "ask-hn-how-are-much-smarter-ai-models-made", "title": "Ask HN: How are much smarter AI models made?", "summary": "A Hacker News user asked how successive generations of AI models are built, questioning whether Anthropic's Opus is trained from scratch, derived from Sonnet, or largely the same model with more compute and training. The post also asked how models like Astra make sudden capability jumps and whether the gap between Anthropic, Mistral, and other labs comes down to compute and money or to undisclosed training methods, data, architecture, and research breakthroughs. The Ask HN submission had 1 point and 0 comments.", "body_md": "I am curious what actually happens between two generations of AI models.\n\nFor example, how do you go from Sonnet to Opus? Is Opus trained from scratch, built on Sonnet, or mostly the same model with more compute and training?\n\nAnd how do models like Astra suddenly make a big jump in some capabilities? What is stopping Anthropic, Mistral, or others from doing the same thing? Is the main difference just more compute and money, or are there training methods, data, architecture, and research breakthroughs that competitors may not know about?\n\nI can't think of a better place to ask this. I am guessing there are people here who actually work on these models and know what goes on behind the scenes.\n\nComments URL: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49662978](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49662978)\n\nPoints: 1\n\n# Comments: 0", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ask-hn-how-are-much-smarter-ai-models-made", "canonical_source": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49662978", "published_at": "2026-09-11 18:24:20+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-09-11 18:46:03.804345+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "large-language-models", "ai-research"], "entities": ["Hacker News", "Anthropic", "Sonnet", "Opus", "Mistral", "Astra"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ask-hn-how-are-much-smarter-ai-models-made", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ask-hn-how-are-much-smarter-ai-models-made.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ask-hn-how-are-much-smarter-ai-models-made.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ask-hn-how-are-much-smarter-ai-models-made.jsonld"}}