Claude Haiku 5.5 vs Moondream 2

Claude Haiku 5.5 is a proprietary multimodal language model from Anthropic and the smallest member of the Claude 5.5 family, released on October 7, 2026 after Claude Opus 5.5 and Claude Sonnet 5.5. It accepts text and image input and returns text, with a 1M token context window and up to 128K output tokens per request. It is the first Haiku-class model with an adjustable effort parameter: adaptive thinking is on by default and the model decides how much to reason, steered by effort levels from low to max with medium as the default. Its training data cutoff is June 2026. Pricing starts at $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens for prompts up to 100K tokens, which Anthropic reports is about 90% lower than Claude Haiku 4.5 for requests in that range.

Anthropic positions Haiku 5.5 for high-volume, latency-sensitive work such as classification, extraction, routing, summarization, and subagent tasks, and describes it as its fastest model to date at standard speed. On visual and agentic evaluations reported at launch, it scores 46.4% on Chartography, a chart reading benchmark, compared with 6.4% for Haiku 4.5 and 61.6% for Sonnet 5.5, and 72.4% on the offline subset of OSWorld 2.1, a screenshot driven computer use benchmark, compared with 15.7% for Haiku 4.5. It uses the same tokenizer as Claude Opus 4.7 and later models, so the same text counts as roughly 30% more tokens than on Haiku 4.5.

Moondream 2 is a small open-source vision-language model from Moondream, the company founded by Vikhyat Korrapati. It was first released in early 2024 and updated through mid-2025. At approximately 1.9 billion parameters, it is designed to run efficiently on consumer hardware such as laptops and edge devices while supporting a practical range of multimodal tasks. Moondream 2 combines a vision encoder based on SigLIP with a compact language backbone, trained for image understanding tasks rather than as a general chat model.

The model accepts an image paired with a natural language prompt and produces text responses, supporting visual question answering, image captioning, and image-conditioned dialogue. Later Moondream 2 releases added object localization through a point API that returns coordinates for queried objects, along with improvements to OCR, counting, and document understanding. Moondream 2 is distributed under the Apache 2.0 license and is available through Hugging Face and the maintainer's distribution. Because the model is updated frequently, production deployments should pin to a specific revision rather than tracking the latest release. A successor model, Moondream 3 (Preview), was released in September 2025 with a 9B mixture-of-experts architecture and 2B active parameters, offering substantially stronger visual reasoning than Moondream 2 while retaining the efficiency-focused design. A referring expression segmentation extension to Moondream 3 was released in March 2026.