We pitted Base 44's new AI model against Anthropic's to build the same website. One was faster.

Base44 launched its own AI model, Base 1, earlier this week. Base44 Base44 just released its own AI model, Base 1, which it hopes will reduce AI-slop design. We put it to the test by pitting it against Anthropic's Opus 4.8, asking both to build the same website. Base 1 was faster and used fewer credits to deliver a competitive product. Base44 launched its own AI model to edge out competitors like Lovable, Replit, and Cursor. Maor Shlomo, the founder and CEO of Base44, told Business Insider that part of the reason the San Francisco-headquartered vibe-coding startup trained its own LLM was to reduce the AI-slop look that has come to define vibe-coded products. Design gurus have said that websites built with frontier models like Anthropic's Opus 4.8, OpenAI's GPT-5.5, or Gemini 3 often share similar interfaces and design elements, such as rounded corners, beige color palettes, and excessive use of emojis. Base44's competitors, such as Lovable and Replit , use these underlying models. For instance, Paul Bakaus, the CEO of AI design startup Impeccable, said in a June interview with Andreessen Horowitz that the designs of these sites look like an "algorithmic Uniqlo or Ikea" — functional but basic. Shlomo said Base 1, in its more advanced versions in the future, will "create something that looked uniquely different" every time, but "It's going to take some effort, so we are not yet there." He also said the model would produce faster results and cost users fewer credits than using frontier models. Base44 is a subsidiary of the website-building company Wix. To see how the model fared, I pitted Base 1 against Anthropic's Opus 4.8 to vibe code the same website . Making a website for a fictional mood lamp I selected Base 1 as my working AI model while building my website. Screenshot/Business Insider I settled on building an e-commerce website for a fictional product — an emotional support lamp that can read Google calendars and change its hue depending on the ongoing event. I