> Open models are served via various means, some by the companies that released them and some by third parties like OpenRouter. Unfortunately, both of these routes are dodgier in terms of privacy and data sharing, and I would not feel the same comfort sending API calls containing client or confidential data to them.
That's why I'm using eurouter.ai with the following routing rule for all my requests:
Sure, it's quite expensive, but at least on a legal side data privacy is ensured. I trust them more than e.g. Anthropic, OpenAI or OpenRouter.
Personally, I find it morally unacceptable to use U.S. AI tools, because I do not want to support them financially and thus support the crimes they are involved in[1].
The part that gets me about anthropic red lines is "of Americans", okay so the rest of the civilized world is up for grabs then? It's okay to destabalize allies with sabotaged tests (in machine learning) and data exfiltration outside America?
What gets me the most is that they claim that the model should follow the https://www.anthropic.com/constitution and they claim that it's embedded into the model. However, system prompts in claude code and cowork re-iterate all of these points and if they're embedded you shouldn't need to do that. Now, if you ask the API version of claude to be a hitler supporter with enough prompt engineering it will become one which directly contradicts what they claim to do, opus 4.7 specifically will be happy to create anti-(insert minority group) propaganda although I haven't had the same success with 4.8 thus far, but I also haven't been motivated enough to push it in that direction yet since I've been more interested in exploting the cyber capabilities of the model.
My conclusion from the very start is that Anthropic's strategy are pure optics and considering the fact that there was an outpoor of support for the company I think it has been very successful.
Yeah, it was funny seeing a bunch of people going like "Anthropic is fighting for privacy" meanwhile I'm like "Uhh, what about the other 8 billion people?"
> The part that gets me about anthropic red lines is "of Americans", okay so the rest of the civilized world is up for grabs then? It's okay to destabalize allies with sabotaged tests (in machine learning) and data exfiltration outside America?
Regardless of Anthropic's "moral" position (inasmuch as a corporation can even have morals) against spying on non-Americans, they would have no way to enforce that limitation against the government because non-citizens outside of the USA have no protections from the intrusions of the US government.
I had a look at eurouter.ai and it seems like an extremely bad offer.
- The prices are ridiculous (15 % markup for free account).
- They have a rate limit of 1000 requests per month, unless you pay 40€ per month for ... what exactly is their value proposition?
- They have a single provider (TensorX) for DeepSeek-V4-Pro, with a cache read cost that is over 100 times higher than DeepSeek ($0.44 vs $0.003625). Notably, I had to look at the TensorX website for that information, since I could not find any information about cached token cost on eurorouter.ai.
Not only it requires a minimum payment of 39 euro, it doesn't accept cryptocurrency althogh that can be worked around by buying a prepaid virtual card for crypto.
Output quality immediately comes to mind, of course.
Models are converging, but they converge in bands, and frontier is frontier. I would not like to have any workflows in any area of my business where output is generated by an assortment of models from different providers. For trivial, mundane tasks that might be fine, but it certainly doesn't apply across the board.
Why use EU specifically? I get not trusting the US, of course, but surely the EU isn't far behind in its desire to spy on its own citizens. Do you not live there?
From all the large governmental institutions, the EU is the one currently holding up traditional western values. That gives it street cred in this subject.
With all the issues in the US and generally wrong direction, I can’t remember them ever arresting people for mean tweets in the way that Germany and the UK have. They all seem to be running full speed towards a surveillance state.
> With all the issues in the US and generally wrong direction, I can’t remember them ever arresting people for mean tweets in the way that Germany and the UK have.
Then you haven't been paying attention. The constitution prevents citizens from being convicted, but that doesn't stop arrests or being turned away at the border (even for permanent residents who've lived in the US for decades), and US citizens don't seem to care, so it's cold comfort for many of us.
Most of us do care. Trump's approval rating is pretty low at 36%, and his disapproval rating is high. Just because he's still causing chaos doesn't mean the majority of us don't care about it. There's just no legal way to remove him, and his cronies simply won't do it - there's not enough votes in congress or he would have been gone after his first or second impeachment.
I understand your point, however I don’t buy „there's just no legal way to remove him“. With so low ratings where are the daily protests against such type of government? Surely, nationwide daily protests would make elected officials reconsider their positions, given an upcoming midterm election, while there still is one.
Don’t get me wrong, I know the thousands reasons why you won’t join a protest, I’m „guilty“ myself. I just want to argue against your argument that I quoted because this puts all of us in an unhelpful victim mentality.
> Surely, nationwide daily protests would make elected officials reconsider their positions, given an upcoming midterm election, while there still is one.
Hah. When was the last time a non-violent protest yielded some kind of result by itself? Certainly never in american history.
Anyway, there are daily protests. They just aren't covered by the media. Hell, the protests for palestine never stopped... the media just never wanted to cover them.
Although 36% is low, it's not that low. The US's two-party system means that ~40-50% are aligned with either party and approve/disapprove on GP. The real number to pay attention to is the change over time in the approval rating: https://www.cnn.com/polling/approval/trump-cnn-poll-of-polls
Trump's highest rating was ~47% when he came into office, but he was pretty stably in the low 40s until the new war. The actual drop is somewhere from ~40-42 to ~36-38 - about 10% of his base. Significant, but probably not enough to actually matter unless it drops further.
Then again, nationwide daily protests would give the Trump administration an excuse to send ICE / the army / whoever else they can send to the cities where the protests take place (I guess they would be mostly blue-leaning ones) to "restore order", and at the same time lay the groundwork for influencing the November elections.
But the turnout at the periodic nationwide "No Kings" protests has been very good, and they have fortunately stayed peaceful.
This isn't about Trump. No 4th amendment rights at the border has been an issue for at least 20 years, but US citizens don't care because it doesn't affect citizens.
Yep, this was an issue long before Trump. They’ve just amped up the scale and stopped bothering with the deceit that they know doesn’t bother Americans.
A 36% approval rating is sky-high for a president that started a pointless immensely costly war after getting elected on a platform of "no more costly wars" and is in the process of negotiating an immensely unfavorable deal with Iran after getting elected on a platform of "Obama's deal with Iran was terrible, I could do much better".
By contrast, Biden at the same point in his term was hovering around 39%, for the heinous crime of... rebuilding the US economy? Including some woke riders in his infrastructure bill?
At this point, a fair assessment of US citizens is that on average, they seem to consider that being a right-wing autocrat wannabe, threatening to invade allied countries "as a negotiating tactic", being a climate change denier, starting a humiliating failed war, trying to blackmail the press into compliance, etc, are about 3% worse than being a cringe center-left bureaucrat.
"US citizens don't seem to care" is an apt hyperbole.
It doesn't help that many of those "center-left" democrats (whatever that refers to) seem to be criticizing trump for letting iran off too easy, not you know starting a stupid war nobody in their right might would want, bombing a school, wasting american lives, driving up prices, risking the global economy, throwing lebanon under the bus... nope, he let iran off too easy. Cf cory booker
When the parties are both fucking stupid when it comes to issues that matter, the entire right/left spectrum goes out the window.
You are talking about something different (in bad faith). Please share a single instance of a US citizen being arrested for an offensive social media post.
The US has arrested many people for speech, and even made charges stick many time. A famous historical example is charging Eugene Debs (and many others) with sedition for opposing WWI and the draft. There was at least one case of being arrested for political social media posts, already linked in adjacent threads. Threats of violence or even sufficiently harsh language to cause fear-for-life can be a crime. "Revenge porn" and deepfakes have had laws passed curtailing them and prosecutions made. The US is certainly less restrictive of speech than other countries, but you're nowhere near entirely free to say or post anything you want.
A few people being stopped to check if their residency is valid is more than fine considering the last admin flooded the country with 20mil migrants with its open border policy
[x] Doesn’t know UK not in EU
[x] Thinks people inciting violence online a free speech -issue
[x] Calls Germany a surveillance state when US uses Palantir - a US company - to openly spy on its citizens
X seems to work great. Inciting men in with gambling, porn, crypto, ai and other broistan staples, then feeding them far-right nonsense info points.
One guy spent 37 days in jail for re-posting a thing trump said ("We have to get over it" in reference to a school shooting), after Charlie Kirk was killed.
> The US federal government forced Paramount to take Colbert off the air.
Not really; the Ellisons are quite close to Trump. Nobody was forced to do anything. Had the FCC actually revoked their license, and had Paramount actually been willing to fight, they could have sued. It's not easy to force anyone that rich to do anything; the state works on behalf of capital. It seems like europe is more aware of the meaningless bluster than the actual crimes being committed
There are much better things to point to to illustrate the deterioration of the rule of law, like blatantly illegal deportation of citizens without due process. Or raping children in concentration camps under the guise of cracking down on crime. We may never even know who was seized and what happened to them and there's little incentive for our very pro-corporate media to report on it.
The UK can arrest you for hate speech. You can disagree with that policy on free speech terms if you want, and that’s really a maximal free speech position. It’s a very strange position to hold if you’re claiming that the U.S. is better when it comes to free speech. The U.S. administration is engaged in active smear campaigns against anyone who speaks loudly against them, threatened to revoke licenses of media companies, they’re suing people and corporations to silence them and pressure them into conformance, they’re threatening to deport people who are simply expressing anti-Israel views, threatened to remove funding from universities, deployed the military in cities they don’t like for no other reason than intimidation of political rivals. This is just off the top of my head.
There’s just no comparison really. You must really be inhaling some nonsense X propaganda if you think government overreach is worse in Western Europe.
I as a individual won’t get arrested for speaking my mind, and that’s much more important than some legal battle around corporate media.
„ deployed the military in cities they don’t like for no other reason than intimidation of political rivals”
That’s one perspective on simply trying to enforce laws.
Moreover, let’s not forget about how Biden government tried to silence Rogan.
A Russian and an American get on a plane in Moscow and get to talking. The Russian says he works for the Kremlin and he's on his way to go learn American propaganda techniques.
"What American propaganda techniques?" asks the American.
I'm honestly not really sure what "traditional western values" have to do with where to store data. What does that even refer to—individualism? Christianity? Representation in court by lawyers? How does this intersect with the topic at hand?
Edit: c'mon people, if you're going to use such ambiguous phrases at least have the spine to clue the reader in to what you want them to refer to in this context.
Well there have been a lot.. philosopy, polis, democracy, hemlock cup, enlightenment (note the perversion of "the dark enlightenment"), modernity, the resistance (against Nazism), psychoanalysis, postmodernism and critical studies (postmodernism in the genuine sense of the philosophies/theories that you would assign that label to and not in the misguided sense of relativism as arbitrarity; basically continental philosophy, frankfurt school (e.g. adorno horkheimer, habermas) and the french (e.g. foucault, derrida, deleuze (& guattari))
Of course there were also absolutism, colonialism, the jacobines, nazism & facism, to name just a few. Part of western values, from my perspective at least, is an implicit promise, that what happened in the 20th century with facism was the darkest hour, so to speak-> never again
For what? Does the EU not want to spy on its citizens? That strikes me as... unlikely.
Why not host in east asia? Or southeast asia? Or south america? Or africa? Then you avoid both the government with incentive to spy on you (assuming you live in the EU) and american companies.
EU member *countries" certainly do, but that's true of all countries that have the ability.
If anything the EU puts limits on what EU member countries and companies can do.
By hosting in one of the EU countries you have stronger legal guarantees on data privacy than in any other area.
A possible exception is Switzerland (not a EU member), which historically has had even stronger privacy laws, though these have been weakened recently IIRC.
I think it's interesting that people write off open weight models because they're "a few months behind" proprietary models.
I know LLMs move at the speed of light (especially these past few quarters), but if Opus and GPT "a few months ago" were really like open weight models, then there's really no reason to not switch, especially for those who were using these models a few months ago.
Your codebase didn't change, so use the open weight model. Don't move the goalposts.
Every new proprietary model is "groundbreaking" and "look, it just solved task X that no other model could solve," only to be referred to as "that crappy previous-generation model" a month later.
So yeah, I'm totally fine using Kimi-2.7, GLM-5.2 or Deepseek-v4. I think we've already hit the ceiling and most improvements now seem to be from harness improvements and slightly better RL to improve reasoning/tool calling.
There's at least the possibility that they intentionally degrade the models as time passes. We can't really verify that we're getting what we're paying for all of the time. All the more reason to invest in local inference.
What if the new model is exactly as good as the last model on launch day but better than the last model was on the new model's launch day because it was degraded? Every single time?
Makes me think of [shepherd tones](Shepard tone - Wikipedia https://share.google/xooRbF7wIIhcsTt2J) which sounds like they're rising in pitch indefinitely
There are lots of benchmarks to compare the absolute values of different models on the same scale (as opposed to vibes (my apologies for the shorthand), etc.).
The thought has definitely crossed my mind. I don't think it's true because there's definitely an improvement when new models are released.
Maybe the truth is the newest models aren't actually as impressive as we thought. Maybe our perception of progress is being manipulated via months of gradual, silent and unverifiable degradation.
Unless what you're getting is really explicitly spelled out in a contract, you should flatly assume that they're doing whatever they like whenever they like.
People talk about this a lot. What I have never seen is a discussion of methods they might employ to degrade the models.
Let’s say I’m a bad faith LLM operator, and I want to degrade my model so the next release looks better and people want to switch to the more expensive one. How would I do that?
They would quantize the model. That'd make it cheaper to run, and have slightly worse output but it would still generate outputs with a similar feel, derived from a compressed version of the same knowledge base etc.
They wouldn't even need to do this uniformly, quantized versions of the model could be routed only a subset of the requests. They could do this to nerf the old model, or more likely just to give themselves more hardware to run the new one on by handling more requests on less hardware. Or to handle increased request volume as traffic ramps up faster than hardware can be provisioned.
Playing with local models at various quants, the degradation can be hard to spot. Sometimes it's only noticeable in aggregate. And even then, you never really know if you just got unlucky with a bad response due to RNG.
I've had Opus 4.6 fall into some weirdly incoherent loops that I rarely see from even Sonnet, that felt like the kind of thing I got frequently with Qwen3.5 9B on local. And the above applies... Was that just bad RNG? Or was my request to Opus routed to some lower quality variant? There's no great way for me to tell for any given request, nor any way to guarantee Anthropic _didn't_ do that.
I have had the same experiences you've had with 4.6 and it was ever since they brought out 4.7. It's fairly obvious they're doing something like you've said here.
Forgot to mention, but it was after the 4.7 release when I was still using 4.6 that I saw those loops too... Before that, 4.6 had been a pretty seamless experience.
I'm pretty sure you could do n-expert capping on any MoE model with only a handful lines of changes to ik_llama.cpp, but yeah... my bet is the have various quantisations and run the lower ones at peak (along with different system prompts i.e we're GPU-bound right now. Get to the point with less chatter)
Current prices are insane but at this point I'm starting to feel like it's an existential issue. I'm not a US citizen. At any point the USA could come up with some arbitrary export controls. Not having a computer capable of running at least Qwen is starting to actually seem risky to me.
At least it's going to be usable as a very high end gaming PC.
Why would you buy and build everything before the low probability catastrophe strikes, though? You don’t get any benefit from switching early and you pay a big opportunity cost.
There is also a low probability that someone enters peace negotiations solely to threaten the negotiators with death, yet here we are. With these guys it is: Better safe than sorry.
Also, there's a nontrivial learning curve involved in running your own inference server, once you move past the casual-goofing-around-with-llama-server stage. If you care about not being a sharecropper on Sam's or Dario's plantation, you should consider learning the ropes. Even if you don't put these skills to immediate use in your day job.
I didn't appreciate this until I started down that road myself.
> If you care about not being a sharecropper on Sam's or Dario's plantation
Couldn't have put it better myself. That's what all this comes down to. Owning the hardware, owning the inference. Not perpetually renting them out on a meter like in the dystopian future they're envisioning.
I’m an LLM fan, but from an engineering perspective the idea of building atop services that palpably fluctuate in capacity, performance, and capability is nutty.
Even with minor automation I feel like I can watch OpenAI and Anthropic engineers fiddling in real-time. Tuesdays behaviour changes by Thursday, 10AMs production isn’t possible at 11:30AM. Nutty.
I chilled significantly on using Google for anything to do with business due to API (and offering) stability. (Still use Google for personal things.) But AI models seem orders of magnitude more fluid, so to my risk-averse eye, they're nothing I'd base my own business on.
Since I started running my own inference server, I've had zero degradation that I didn't do myself. Basically the only time I see it get worse is if I drop one of the quants.
Which is what I suspect the providers are doing to fit more inference on the same amount of hardware over time.
> I think it's interesting that people write off open weight models because they're "a few months behind" proprietary models
I experiment a lot with the open models and I’m getting tired of this trope. I’m not yet convinced that even the best open weight models are equal to Opus from “a few months” ago.
I know what the benchmarks say. I had higher hopes. My real experience just doesn’t match the benchmarks.
I also do a lot of work that even Opus 4.8 struggles with. When even the cutting edge LLMs aren’t all the way there yet, my motivation to switch to something even further behind just isn’t there.
Have you found anything specific that the full-precision quant of GLM 5.2 can't do that Opus 4.8 can? I haven't, so far.
5.2 lives up to the hype. I don't find it to be the best at anything except coding. But for coding... yeah, it lives up to the hype. Not quite Opus 4.8-level, but I would feel comfortable comparing it to 4.5, at least if it had vision capabilities.
To be a little bit more precise than "a few months behind", what probably matters is before or after "Claude Opus 4.5 from Nov 24, 2025". That was the model which started the OpenClaw hype over Christmas.
We have a provider with Deepseek V4 flash at our work. It can handle 95% of the "actually functional" workload at a tenth of the cost. I still pull up beefier ones sometimes, but that's after some consideration.
The moat is so flat, it only gives +1 food and +1 production. +1 gold with a road.
Same, i feel that V4 Flash is great at task implementation, but im still looking at bigger models for design. Now, GLM 5.2 with high thinking is actually getting really close now. I have switched for all personal projects right now and am quite happy with the results. I think the magic is in the big context window (1m) + a lot of thinking gets us very close to at least Opus 4.6 level. Im currently running directly on z.ai with a lite coding plan, and have bought API credit on deekseek as well. I will be looking at EU based hosts next and then i might switch over some of the more critical flows.
Intelligence is maybe a few months behind. But cost sadly is further behind. GLM-5.2 has a deceptively high cost during day-to-day usage for e.g. coding because 1) it has to think a ton more than GPT-5.5/Opus-4.8 to get to competitive results; 2) many providers are still figuring out caching; and 3) API pricing for Codex/Claude can be as high as 40x more than subscription pricing, which distorts the market.
For that matter, the new models are shit. If I’m using Opus 4.6 anyway to get anything actually done, then great, we’re actually entirely caught up then.
> I think it's interesting that people write off open weight models because they're "a few months behind" proprietary models.
The really interesting thing is that it's typically those very same accounts who were explaining, a few months ago, that thanks to their commercial model they were gaining so much time and producing so much fantastic code.
A few months passes and suddenly the open-source model have caught up with the models that were gaining them so much time and that produced amazing code (in production everywhere for sure btw) but... It's impossible to work with these models.
Rinse and repeat.
The current models, according to them, are basically AGI and they can go fishing while paid subscriptions solve the world's problems.
But when it six months there shall be new closed, pricey, models and when the open ones shall have reach the level of Fable, we'll hear how it's impossible to work in late 2026 on a model that is "only at the level of Fable".
These people should have been snake-oil salesmen (and it could be what they actually are).
My most charitable interpretation that there's some honeymoon effect for each release, and people genuinely feel very productive and useful for 2-3 months. By the time the next big model release happens they've seen some issues or run into something that makes them feel like the new model will fix all that and improve their flow so much, etc.
Not unusual in the tech space, but this has been basically constantly happening for two years now? I can't imagine the improvements are more than incremental at this point.
They are generally referred to as the Kool-Aid drinkers. There's always something holding them back from open models. It's no different than the argument in the article. I've been daily driving Linux for well over 20 years at this point and while things have gotten easier they haven't gotten that much easier. There's always been a distro that's focused on new users or ease of use. I used to take for granted the Linux distro ecosystem but now worry how Microsoft, Apple and others will continue to try and legislate compute into a corner. I can appreciate good engineering, but when I look at OS X and Windows they're both failing end users in different ways.
Just like the OS ecosystem I think we'll see a similar trajectory with OAI, Anthropic and Google but on a much accelerated time scale. I think the lobbying has begun to lock in their fate for revenue - because none of them give a shit about their users. I do hope, however, that Anthropic continues to over rotate and continue to gimp their models into uselessness. I just asked Opus 4.8 the other day to look at some code as an adversary and summarize areas that should be addressed. Nothing specific and it shut down the conversation. However starting a new prompt and prodding the model from a different angle yielded the results I asked for directly. Pick a lane. Or, don't and continue to lose industry respect and consideration.
Even just one of the smaller models is good enough for the grunt work I use them for 90% of the time. Currently doing most of my home hobby projects with OpenCode Go and Qwen 3.7 Plus, it's not great at diagnosing issues in the code, but if I can clearly articulate a test suite or boilerplate refactoring it works fine.
Heh, if you're using LLMs heavily for work I think odds are pretty good you're doing pretty trivial stuff. It might not be trivial to you, but you're probably just not very good at this.
I find the attitude shown in this post very surprising. On the one hand, the post starts with a story of adopting Linux and other FOSS. The core of FOSS is giving its users the ability to understand and modify software they run. On the other hand, the rest of the post is about using a tool (LLM) that the author has no way to modify and no way to understand. Huge matrices of floats are at best comparable to compiled code. But the reality is even worse - it’s actually easier to decompile and understand proprietary software. Not to mention the fact the most of the time users can’t even run the “open” models since it requires hardware that most can’t afford.
How did we get from prising software freedoms to this?
What's amazing about these models is they are effectively a distillation of the internet in something that can fit onto your local machine [1] and be queried via natural language.
[1] It seems inevitable that decent local models will be possible as the technology and the hardware is improving at a rate beyond the growth of the knowledge base to be distilled.
It was easy to be a rebel and use Linux when it was clearly competent, but needed hacks and extra elbow grease to get it polished for use. IME, the open models are “not there yet” in terms of capability or operational needs. Sure, GLM5.2 looks competent, but I will only be able to get it to run that competent if I had a huge cluster of GPUs.. if I am accessing an open model via hosted API, I might as well run a closed model via hosted API. The incentives fall apart in comparison to using Linux 15 years ago.
Don’t get me wrong. I wish I could run a local model and be happy about it. At the moment, I’m not.
> if I am accessing an open model via hosted API, I might as well run a closed model via hosted API.
uh.. no?
The whole thing is that it cannot be enshittified, because there's not just a single party having control over it.
As it has happened, is happening and will happen.
With open weights, you cannot easily be rugpulled or locked out or any of that stuff. If the corp attempts that, someone else with an server farm will gladly take you as a customer with absolutely 0 changes to your workflow other than swapping out the API URL + Key.
You'll be talking to the same model with the same personality and same knowledge.
There are downsides depending on how good is your harness. Switching the model is easy enough. Ensuring that the harness continues working the way it did is a completely different thing. This is not just about the prompts but also general behaviour around the model and its infrastructure.
So while it is not complicated and certainly something that can be solved, it is not plug and play.
That being said, we switch to open weight models earlier this month and the results has been more than positive so far. The cost savings are also hard to dismiss.
Claude started becoming useful for my coding purposes after it hit version 4.6. After that sure some nice to have additions but I think if I had 4.6 sonnet & opus as open weights, I would not need something more.
Having played a bit with Fable, reinforced the above.
The headline says one thing, then the article text says this:
> I’m hoping it’s going to be minimal.
I have multiple subscriptions and I pay per token to try out different LLM providers through OpenRouter. I also run open weight models locally.
I just can’t agree yet. The models from Anthropic and OpenAI really are that much better than anything else. The open weight models must be universally benchmaxxed across the board because my real world experience with them is very different than what the benchmarks imply. I get downvoted a lot for speaking about my experience because I don’t think it’s the reality that people want to hear right now, but it’s true for complex work.
I do think there are a lot of easier tasks that can be handled appropriately by the open weight models in the hands of a skilled operator. If an entire job is simple enough that you wouldn’t hesitate to hand it off to a junior with a little supervision then any model will do. However for a lot of the work I do, even Opus 4.8 on Max requires a lot of attention and extra steering and review to keep it on track. Fable did, too, though to a lesser degree. When I try to use the big open weight models (hosted, because they’re not running at reasonable speeds locally at a quantization I can tolerate) it feels like I spend more time waiting while they burn tokens for output that I probably have to reject anyway, at least for the bigger tasks. I wish they were there, but that’s not the case yet.
I’ve been wanting to get better acquainted with local inference but I don’t have the hardware, which has made me think about something I haven’t seen discussed, which is local collaboratives. The economics makes it seem like a group of people joining together to run good hardware and an open model might make sense, but I haven’t seen anything like this mentioned. Have I been missing it?
I think it would be pretty neat to launch a service helping people who wanted to participate in something like that locate one another.
There are plenty of providers of open models that offer very affordable rates. Generally, I recommend looking at OpenRouter since they track various metrics for the various providers.
TL;DR: Running GLM 5.2 is going to cost about $20K minimum, and that's going to be painfully slow compared to the cloud hosted versions. Even the estimates where the server is computing tokens 24/7 you can't break even for several years.
The only reason to run locally is if complete data privacy is your top concern. You pay a high premium for that.
I mean sure, I’d you’re attempting to run the biggest possible models, it’s going to require a stupid amount of compute? I thought we all knew this?
The appeal to me is that we can run that, but we can also run smaller models on your laptop _and it’s functional!_ I can run DeepSeek v4 flash and a qwen 3.6 on my laptop! Thats crazy good.
AWS Bedrock hosts Gemma 4 31B and this is The Best Deal – hands down. Try it. Vertex also has Gemma 4 MoE version. Not "lobotomised" by quants. There are also GLM (latest) and Qwen / DS (but these two are not latest versions)
One big advantage I’ve found — people get attached to models (including me). With open models if you find one that works perfectly for you but the next version doesn’t, you can run the old one forever (or someone will for you)
But… the models will fall behind. As libraries and languages and tool calling updates or the world knowledge changes, the models decay.
Personally, I don’t like the change, but it’s just how technology works so I’d rather move with the flow than try to stick my foot down and freeze time.
Yes but why does that matter?
If I am happy with its capabilities now, I will continue being happy with its capabilities in the future.
Yes, it cannot do the newest magic shit, but why does that matter?
It can still do everything that existed up until that point, which is _a lot_.
Eventually, you might also need something new, but it's not like the world shifts over all problems that exist from <old> to <new> and any tech for <old> problems suddenly becomes obsolete?
ideally, the software produced should include the latest security patches.
If the model prefers a version of Ruby or node with an RCE, I guess you can burn tokens to teach the model how to avoid the introducing the vulnerability into your code?
One reason might be request limits. OpenAI's ChatGPT Plus w/Codex ($20/month) provides a worst-case 5-hour-request-limit of 15 for GPT-5.5, 20 for GPT-5.4, 60 for GPT-5.4-Mini. Whereas Z.ai Lite ($18/month) provides a worst-case of ~80 for GLM 5.2 (off-peak; on-peak is 2am-6am New York time). So Z.ai can provide higher limits for a cheaper price. (https://codeberg.org/mutablecc/calculate-ai-cost/src/branch/...)
the pricing page doesn't seem to call it out anymore, but the claim on z.ai coding plan used to be 3x the usage of the equivalent-price claude plan. whether that's accurate i don't know, but just based on api pricing GLM is way cheaper.
While I agree with some of the gist of the article, 2 remarks:
1. Unfortunatly in my tests the open models do not (yet?) rival, at least Claude Opus, for software development/engineering and adjacent tasks.
2. Enjoy while it lasts. I'll be genuinly amazed these open models will not be declared 'illegal' under some security pretense by the end of the year. And I say 'pretense' because the primary driver will be regulatory capture and industry protectionism.
It seems the best self-hosted and the worst models served by big providers has some considerable overlap in quality.
Whatever reason people have to run those (cheaper? backwards compatibility once you get something running) surely applies to the open models too, maybe even more so.
Have you read about Opencode Go? They are great provider for open model, like GLM 5.2, Deepseek v4 Pro, Kimi 2.7 Code. You should give it shot to them :-)
> It’s unclear to me what the advantages of openrouter are but it seems to be a default I see many people talking about here.
The advantage of OpenRouter compared to using API providers directly is that you can switch between API providers without binding your money to a single provider.
The advantage of OpenRouter compared to OpenCode Go is that the price for DeepSeek-V4-Pro and MiMo-V2.5-Pro is better on OpenRouter.
But since you get a monthly usage limit of $60 with the OpenCode Go plan for $10 (i.e. 6x), you might still come out ahead if you use it a lot (or use other models, where the pricing difference is smaller or non-existent).
I guess this will happen soon. There are two catalysts needed for this to happen:
1. Evals that can quickly tell you how much downside there is to switching
2. Something like OpenRouter that can help you run those evals quickly
Now #2 is starting to become popular, and I think we'll soon see more people adopting a model-agnostic approach. Of course, there will still be high-intelligence use cases where nothing comes close to Claude or GPT.
Exactly. I'm very happy the discourse has moved on from "but X model is the best" to "you can use open models".
Whether you're using SDK or harness based agents, having evals means you're able to modify any part of your agent and still know what satisfies your "good enough".
It's great for designing products that are easy to change as well.
Any tips on which model to use and how to use them? I have 64 RAM and 16 VRAM (I know it's not a lot, it's a gaming GPU) and I'm trying to find a good model to use but it's a bit of a struggle
Open source models are still not good enough for now, but with the current speed of one new SOTA every two months, by this time next year we will definitely have cheap open source models at least as good as Fable :)
I don't think we will. The open model labs are too resource constrained to approach Fable or even Opus on the general case and I don't see that changing within a year.
Right now, due to profound shortfalls in both data and hardware compared to the US labs, the OSS models are IMO basically technology demonstrators that in practise are even more jagged than the US labs' efforts. The high points of the jaggedness are close - but number of happy paths is many times fewer, and their behaviour inside the harness is far less refined. Barring some incredible breakthrough I don't think that is changing without a much higher level of resources - which seems impossible given the current hardware environment.
I have no reason to think that Anthropic or OpenAI are in possession of some secret sauce that the Chinese labs can't duplicate given the right resources, but the fact remains that absent those resources they'll remain behind. Barring some incredible bombshell reveal from Huawei I don't think this asymmetry resolves in a year. In three years it may well be a different story.
deepseek-v4-pro, probably the representative cheap opensouce LLM, was released in 2026.4 One year before, what OAI had in hand was gpt-4.1 and gpt-o3. I think it is not very controversial to say that deepseek is stronger than them, at most you can point to some post-training problems, basically the instability you mentioned.
Also I am not sure if it is because the people who are best at using AI -- the people making AI -- get more development speed as the models get smarter, but my feeling is model progress is getting faster and faster. GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 were almost one year apart.
The disadvantage from hardware limits and compute shortage is visible from the size of chinese models. glm-5.2, which is claimed to be around opus-4.6 level in coding, is only 744B. But Chinese engineers are obviously, how to put it, getting very effective results on "performance at the same size". And that is not even talking about the advantages from China's electricity, manpower, or even "national will" to compete against America.
So saying it may take three years to catch up with a gap that is now only several months looks too pessimistic. ChatGPT itself was released only three and a half years ago, and today is already a completely different world.
But the question was about whether the Chinese labs will have fable-equivalence in 1 year. I am by no means some kind of insider, but knowing the vaguest outlines of what went into Mythos, they just can't do it. The compute is not there. The Chinese engineers are incredible, but they're not literal magicians.
Of course there could be something incredible to come out of left field and overturn the apple cart yet again, but that's speculation. It would be awesome, sure! But I wouldn't bet too heavily on it.
And FWIW - again, no disrespect at all to the Chinese engineers but I don't rate GLM5.2 as being even close to opus 4.6. It can hit a few benchmarks, sure, that's the top edge of the "jag". But filling in the rest of the capabilities - again, it takes compute and data the OSS labs just don't have, that anyone knows about at least.
OK, now what? Someone offers open models as a service? That's basically a time-sharing computing business - people at terminals sharing remote computing resources. If you buy your own H100 it will be idle while you're typing or reading or thinking. So sharing makes sense.
But it doesn't have to be an "AI company". It's just a compute service. The companies that offer web hosting could get into this.
I think the frontier will command premium for sometime just as slight better software developers were 10x's vs their peers as their architecture & development strategies and code approach compounded quickly. One less error per block of work compounds quickly.
Sure, there may be some cases and reasons for local models and industry is so large they will continue to make progress and gather economic value and users for specific use case; but frontier will command vast majority of the economic value distinct from Linux and open source where the model created better than proriatary economic incentives around development
10x developers were not slightly better than their peers, they were vastly superior and faster. OTOH, the lead of frontier llms is diminishing as training is getting diminishing returns.
Also, on that note. Not every company needs 10x developers, just as not every task needs frontier llms. Ultimately, operating costs will be the largest contributing factor.
Ultimately its a financial game. Open source is far cheaper so it already has an upper-hand. Frontier models have to justify financially why they are worth the additional spend.
I am absolutely pro local and true open source models.
Personally I haven't seen any productivity gain since Opus 4.5 times.
But: I can't fully get behind the opinion that (so called) "open source models" are simply superior and will be in the future, because when I asked some models who they are, they answered with "I am Claude from Anthropic", which could mean they have been trained by exfiltrating Claude.
I have NO moral objection to this, as Anthropic and "Open""AI".also trained their models on anything they could get their hands on.
It's more about the question: can and will these models be updated, even if Anthropic et al fail. Who's gonna pay for training then? What's their incentive? Have we reached a plateau?
yeah, on a 96GB Mac Studio and Gemma+Qwen, it's definitely fully doable. fully doable but not really for coding on 16GB. but svelter models and cheaper (eventually) hardware are coming!
"cheaper (eventually) hardware"
Best case 2-3 years from now. Otherwise it will take a major global recession to get us anywhere near last year's prices.
They use the GPU but an Apple Silicon GPU has the same high speed access to all the RAM on the machine as the CPU does, rather than having its own walled-off maybe 16 GB VRAM in mainstream gaming GPUs or 24 GB in RTX 4090 or RTX 5090 (MSRP $1999 but in practice $3000-$4000 at the moment). Nvidia A100 (80GB VRAM) apparently cost $15,000 or so.
Not only does Apple's unified memory give the GPU more RAM to use, but it also eliminates copying things between CPU RAM and GPU RAM.
A Mac Mini with 48 GB RAM costs $1799. A Mac Studio with 96 GB RAM is $3999 — until March you could get a Mac Studio with 512 GB RAM for $3999, all of which could be used for your AI model.
I suspect hosted and local will converge when hardware prices come down and API prices go up. The massive rate of datacenter build out will be unsustainable. Right now the hosted models are massively cheaper than buying the hardware and running it yourself which signals that hosted is very subsidized.
If you don't have that hardware thr math of buying a depreciating computer is challenging if you are satisfied with the $100/month plans ($1200/year). A 96GB Mac Studio is ~$4k. I think if you have the hardware already as a sunk cost then yes it makes sense. But I'm not sure it is worth spending $4k for today's hardware vs waiting for newer hardware in a few years.
I think once the hardware process comes down and these mini DGXs become cheaper, and by then open models still be smaller and better, there is going to be less and less reason to use the providers.
CEOs are already complaining that they are costing too much. There are also large organisations like Banks which can't use external services and are already looking at internal housing.
it's a good thing so the big AI companies just went IPO as once the self hosting trend kicks in they are going bust.
>There was a time not too long ago when using Linux entailed some professional risk1. First there was compatibility: you may not have been able to render a Word document or PowerPoint correctly, and you might have had to trust Open Office’s export capability to render docs the way you wanted
For a while during this era, I used to port my laptops windows installation into a virtual machine that can run on Linux. It took a bit of hacking away but I could usually do it in a day or two. Then its all Linux with the windows vm being used for the microsoft stuff.
I know open models have gotten quite good in many tasks such as coding or composition, but are there any that can access the internet and retrieve data like ChatGPT, Claude, etc can?
I do have to admit I have recently begun wishing I could pay five dollars a month for a "just answer the fucking question" plan that would give me results without the guardrails and without the constant simpering and ego-stroking. I keep finding myself going a quick evaluation of "is it faster for me to skim search results myself or to construct an elaborate narrative to make an AI give me a real answer".
That's why I like qwen3.6 27B, it has 0 ego, it knows that it doesn't have complete world knowledge, so when it sees a web_search tool it searches all the time. Even qwen3.5 9B is mostly search-eager (but given the size, it's weaker on reasoning on the results if that's needed). I use a stock pi harness with only web_search and web_fetch (cleans up the html to only keep text) tools defined.
I have given up on making Opus actually retrieve online information for me. At this point I only query it side by side with qwen to laugh at how it didn't even attempt to search properly, and how a small local model is beating it every time. Gemini is very fast for searching, but somehow miss-sources all the time.
There are tons of existing Skills/MCPs for Google/Kagi/whatever search, and making your own is trivial. I gave DeepSeek in Pi a link to Kagi API docs and asked it to add a web search skill, and it did that easily.
> I know open models have gotten quite good in many tasks such as coding or composition, but are there any that can access the internet and retrieve data like ChatGPT, Claude, etc can?
The things you describe are just tool calling, they're a feature of whatever harness you use. Use OpenCode, pi.dev, or maki.sh with any of the open models.
> I do have to admit I have recently begun wishing I could pay five dollars a month for a "just answer the fucking question" plan that would give me results without the guardrails and without the constant simpering and ego-stroking. I keep finding myself going a quick evaluation of "is it faster for me to skim search results myself or to construct an elaborate narrative to make an AI give me a real answer".
You can do most of this with some system prompts added to whatever agent you're using. You can do it from the settings on the claude/chatgpt websites too. (minus the no-guardrails thing)
You can let the AI solve it itself, and then it will provide two solutions: implement a local search service (easily blocked), or purchase a Web Search API service
As someone that has pretty powerful desktop that I've been using with local open weight models, people are far exaggerating the quality of them. Some of them are now useful. They don't compare yet to the online models of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc. They are still about 18 months behind. I have accomplished useful work with them, like image classification on Gemma4, but they are much much slower, much much more expensive and they don't scale at all.
A $10,000 RTX 6000 Blackwell card will pay for 500 months of Claude or Codex, which is 40 years worth of compute. Obviously they are going to raise their prices, my prediction being to $200-500/month, but that still makes them at least years of compute and they scale very well with more traffic. Single GPUs do not, they are pegged at 100% and good luck getting it to answer multiple queries at the same time.
> Open models are served via various means, some by the companies that released them and some by third parties like OpenRouter. Unfortunately, both of these routes are dodgier in terms of privacy and data sharing, and I would not feel the same comfort sending API calls containing client or confidential data to them.
That's why I'm using eurouter.ai with the following routing rule for all my requests:
Sure, it's quite expensive, but at least on a legal side data privacy is ensured. I trust them more than e.g. Anthropic, OpenAI or OpenRouter.Personally, I find it morally unacceptable to use U.S. AI tools, because I do not want to support them financially and thus support the crimes they are involved in[1].
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48512339
The part that gets me about anthropic red lines is "of Americans", okay so the rest of the civilized world is up for grabs then? It's okay to destabalize allies with sabotaged tests (in machine learning) and data exfiltration outside America?
What gets me the most is that they claim that the model should follow the https://www.anthropic.com/constitution and they claim that it's embedded into the model. However, system prompts in claude code and cowork re-iterate all of these points and if they're embedded you shouldn't need to do that. Now, if you ask the API version of claude to be a hitler supporter with enough prompt engineering it will become one which directly contradicts what they claim to do, opus 4.7 specifically will be happy to create anti-(insert minority group) propaganda although I haven't had the same success with 4.8 thus far, but I also haven't been motivated enough to push it in that direction yet since I've been more interested in exploting the cyber capabilities of the model.
My conclusion from the very start is that Anthropic's strategy are pure optics and considering the fact that there was an outpoor of support for the company I think it has been very successful.
Yeah, it was funny seeing a bunch of people going like "Anthropic is fighting for privacy" meanwhile I'm like "Uhh, what about the other 8 billion people?"
On second thought, it's not funny.
These companies are so good at selling their product's likely incompetence as possibly intentional subversion.
> The part that gets me about anthropic red lines is "of Americans", okay so the rest of the civilized world is up for grabs then? It's okay to destabalize allies with sabotaged tests (in machine learning) and data exfiltration outside America?
Regardless of Anthropic's "moral" position (inasmuch as a corporation can even have morals) against spying on non-Americans, they would have no way to enforce that limitation against the government because non-citizens outside of the USA have no protections from the intrusions of the US government.
I had a look at eurouter.ai and it seems like an extremely bad offer.
- The prices are ridiculous (15 % markup for free account).
- They have a rate limit of 1000 requests per month, unless you pay 40€ per month for ... what exactly is their value proposition?
- They have a single provider (TensorX) for DeepSeek-V4-Pro, with a cache read cost that is over 100 times higher than DeepSeek ($0.44 vs $0.003625). Notably, I had to look at the TensorX website for that information, since I could not find any information about cached token cost on eurorouter.ai.
I guess the prices are for "EU owned" instead of "EU hosted". The data centers in the EU where you can rent GPUs is mostly US companies.
Crimes does not even starts to describe it:
"AI-assisted targeting in the Gaza Strip" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI-assisted_targeting_in_the_G...
"Palantir allegedly enables Israel's AI targeting in Gaza, raising concerns over war crimes" - https://www.business-humanrights.org/de/neuste-meldungen/pal...
"What The Wounds Are Telling Us" - https://www.volkskrant.nl/kijkverder/v/2025/gunshot-palestin...
If data security is an actual concern I don't think there's a solution other than biting the bullet and self-hosting.
Not only it requires a minimum payment of 39 euro, it doesn't accept cryptocurrency althogh that can be worked around by buying a prepaid virtual card for crypto.
You dont care about which exact provider it is using behind the hood ?
No, as long as they follow the requirements, especially the data privacy agreements. What would you? Price?
Output quality immediately comes to mind, of course.
Models are converging, but they converge in bands, and frontier is frontier. I would not like to have any workflows in any area of my business where output is generated by an assortment of models from different providers. For trivial, mundane tasks that might be fine, but it certainly doesn't apply across the board.
GDPR compliant llm was a joke a few months back but here we are
I work in Europe, sometimes with sensitive data, and LLMs weren’t an exception a few months ago.
Maybe it was funny to you, but designing data platforms that respect GDPR and involve LLMs is a thing.
But is no joke anymore.
Why use EU specifically? I get not trusting the US, of course, but surely the EU isn't far behind in its desire to spy on its own citizens. Do you not live there?
From all the large governmental institutions, the EU is the one currently holding up traditional western values. That gives it street cred in this subject.
With all the issues in the US and generally wrong direction, I can’t remember them ever arresting people for mean tweets in the way that Germany and the UK have. They all seem to be running full speed towards a surveillance state.
> With all the issues in the US and generally wrong direction, I can’t remember them ever arresting people for mean tweets in the way that Germany and the UK have.
Then you haven't been paying attention. The constitution prevents citizens from being convicted, but that doesn't stop arrests or being turned away at the border (even for permanent residents who've lived in the US for decades), and US citizens don't seem to care, so it's cold comfort for many of us.
>and US citizens don't seem to care
I think maybe you haven't been paying attention.
Most of us do care. Trump's approval rating is pretty low at 36%, and his disapproval rating is high. Just because he's still causing chaos doesn't mean the majority of us don't care about it. There's just no legal way to remove him, and his cronies simply won't do it - there's not enough votes in congress or he would have been gone after his first or second impeachment.
https://www.npr.org/2026/06/20/nx-s1-5861764/trumps-job-appr...
I understand your point, however I don’t buy „there's just no legal way to remove him“. With so low ratings where are the daily protests against such type of government? Surely, nationwide daily protests would make elected officials reconsider their positions, given an upcoming midterm election, while there still is one.
Don’t get me wrong, I know the thousands reasons why you won’t join a protest, I’m „guilty“ myself. I just want to argue against your argument that I quoted because this puts all of us in an unhelpful victim mentality.
> Surely, nationwide daily protests would make elected officials reconsider their positions, given an upcoming midterm election, while there still is one.
Hah. When was the last time a non-violent protest yielded some kind of result by itself? Certainly never in american history.
Anyway, there are daily protests. They just aren't covered by the media. Hell, the protests for palestine never stopped... the media just never wanted to cover them.
Women's suffrage was relatively nonviolent.
Although 36% is low, it's not that low. The US's two-party system means that ~40-50% are aligned with either party and approve/disapprove on GP. The real number to pay attention to is the change over time in the approval rating: https://www.cnn.com/polling/approval/trump-cnn-poll-of-polls
Trump's highest rating was ~47% when he came into office, but he was pretty stably in the low 40s until the new war. The actual drop is somewhere from ~40-42 to ~36-38 - about 10% of his base. Significant, but probably not enough to actually matter unless it drops further.
Then again, nationwide daily protests would give the Trump administration an excuse to send ICE / the army / whoever else they can send to the cities where the protests take place (I guess they would be mostly blue-leaning ones) to "restore order", and at the same time lay the groundwork for influencing the November elections.
But the turnout at the periodic nationwide "No Kings" protests has been very good, and they have fortunately stayed peaceful.
You'd think a "no oligarchs" protest would be a little more useful given that we aren't likely to revert to a monarchy any time soon.
checks notes what's this? The protests were organized by oligarchic lackeys? Hmm
This isn't about Trump. No 4th amendment rights at the border has been an issue for at least 20 years, but US citizens don't care because it doesn't affect citizens.
Yep, this was an issue long before Trump. They’ve just amped up the scale and stopped bothering with the deceit that they know doesn’t bother Americans.
A 36% approval rating is sky-high for a president that started a pointless immensely costly war after getting elected on a platform of "no more costly wars" and is in the process of negotiating an immensely unfavorable deal with Iran after getting elected on a platform of "Obama's deal with Iran was terrible, I could do much better".
By contrast, Biden at the same point in his term was hovering around 39%, for the heinous crime of... rebuilding the US economy? Including some woke riders in his infrastructure bill?
At this point, a fair assessment of US citizens is that on average, they seem to consider that being a right-wing autocrat wannabe, threatening to invade allied countries "as a negotiating tactic", being a climate change denier, starting a humiliating failed war, trying to blackmail the press into compliance, etc, are about 3% worse than being a cringe center-left bureaucrat.
"US citizens don't seem to care" is an apt hyperbole.
It doesn't help that many of those "center-left" democrats (whatever that refers to) seem to be criticizing trump for letting iran off too easy, not you know starting a stupid war nobody in their right might would want, bombing a school, wasting american lives, driving up prices, risking the global economy, throwing lebanon under the bus... nope, he let iran off too easy. Cf cory booker
When the parties are both fucking stupid when it comes to issues that matter, the entire right/left spectrum goes out the window.
You are talking about something different (in bad faith). Please share a single instance of a US citizen being arrested for an offensive social media post.
A 30 second search found me https://www.fire.org/news/he-spent-37-days-jail-facebook-pos... . You can beat the rap but you can't beat the ride. (And you're pretty thoroughly proving my point about US citizens not caring about anyone else)
Yay you found a single instance, and more over there are legal means of recourse, unlike the the UK when you’re jailed or fined and that’s it
The posts don't even need to be offensive, just uncomfortable:
https://www.fox4news.com/news/woman-arrested-facebook-post-c...
The US has arrested many people for speech, and even made charges stick many time. A famous historical example is charging Eugene Debs (and many others) with sedition for opposing WWI and the draft. There was at least one case of being arrested for political social media posts, already linked in adjacent threads. Threats of violence or even sufficiently harsh language to cause fear-for-life can be a crime. "Revenge porn" and deepfakes have had laws passed curtailing them and prosecutions made. The US is certainly less restrictive of speech than other countries, but you're nowhere near entirely free to say or post anything you want.
https://youtu.be/tB3WVygAM8I
A few people being stopped to check if their residency is valid is more than fine considering the last admin flooded the country with 20mil migrants with its open border policy
[x] Doesn’t know UK not in EU [x] Thinks people inciting violence online a free speech -issue [x] Calls Germany a surveillance state when US uses Palantir - a US company - to openly spy on its citizens
X seems to work great. Inciting men in with gambling, porn, crypto, ai and other broistan staples, then feeding them far-right nonsense info points.
By "mean tweets" I assume you mean death threats? How about not threatening to kill someone on social media, is that so hard to do?
They literally arrested people for quoting Charlie Kirk in tweets after his death.
Source? Or are you another "trust me bro" Redditor.
One guy spent 37 days in jail for re-posting a thing trump said ("We have to get over it" in reference to a school shooting), after Charlie Kirk was killed.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg7pyjxjxrvo
So one guy, and now he’s suing which is a form of justice. No such path in the UK…. You’re fined and/or arrested and that’s all
That’s not the EU.
>traditional western values
This seems tautological because Europe is pretty weak on the values that people in the US might care about (freedom of speech, limited govt, etc).
What values specifically are you optimizing for here?
> values that people in the US might care about (freedom of speech, limited govt, etc).
The US federal government forced Paramount to take Colbert off the air. Seems that people in the US don’t actually value these things.
> What values specifically are you optimizing for here?
Probably not being fascist.
They currently have the military circling a pool to intimidate people trying to take photos of the botched paint job.
Intimidation is the sincerest form of flattery.
> The US federal government forced Paramount to take Colbert off the air.
Not really; the Ellisons are quite close to Trump. Nobody was forced to do anything. Had the FCC actually revoked their license, and had Paramount actually been willing to fight, they could have sued. It's not easy to force anyone that rich to do anything; the state works on behalf of capital. It seems like europe is more aware of the meaningless bluster than the actual crimes being committed
There are much better things to point to to illustrate the deterioration of the rule of law, like blatantly illegal deportation of citizens without due process. Or raping children in concentration camps under the guise of cracking down on crime. We may never even know who was seized and what happened to them and there's little incentive for our very pro-corporate media to report on it.
But sure, paramount is the real victim here.
The UK can arrest you for hate speech. You can disagree with that policy on free speech terms if you want, and that’s really a maximal free speech position. It’s a very strange position to hold if you’re claiming that the U.S. is better when it comes to free speech. The U.S. administration is engaged in active smear campaigns against anyone who speaks loudly against them, threatened to revoke licenses of media companies, they’re suing people and corporations to silence them and pressure them into conformance, they’re threatening to deport people who are simply expressing anti-Israel views, threatened to remove funding from universities, deployed the military in cities they don’t like for no other reason than intimidation of political rivals. This is just off the top of my head.
There’s just no comparison really. You must really be inhaling some nonsense X propaganda if you think government overreach is worse in Western Europe.
The UK is not the EU, the UK is US "lite", they have always been that way, thats not something new.
> The UK can arrest you for hate speech.
https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=13879460433775...
I as a individual won’t get arrested for speaking my mind, and that’s much more important than some legal battle around corporate media.
„ deployed the military in cities they don’t like for no other reason than intimidation of political rivals” That’s one perspective on simply trying to enforce laws.
Moreover, let’s not forget about how Biden government tried to silence Rogan.
> The UK can arrest you for hate speech.
And that's a good thing.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/feb/...
The age old joke;
A Russian and an American are drinking at a bar
The Russian says "I'm impressed by american propaganda. It's so subtle but effective."
The american responds "What are you talking about, we don't do propaganda."
The version in my fortune file is better:
A Russian and an American get on a plane in Moscow and get to talking. The Russian says he works for the Kremlin and he's on his way to go learn American propaganda techniques.
"What American propaganda techniques?" asks the American.
"Exactly," the Russian replies.
I'm honestly not really sure what "traditional western values" have to do with where to store data. What does that even refer to—individualism? Christianity? Representation in court by lawyers? How does this intersect with the topic at hand?
Edit: c'mon people, if you're going to use such ambiguous phrases at least have the spine to clue the reader in to what you want them to refer to in this context.
Well there have been a lot.. philosopy, polis, democracy, hemlock cup, enlightenment (note the perversion of "the dark enlightenment"), modernity, the resistance (against Nazism), psychoanalysis, postmodernism and critical studies (postmodernism in the genuine sense of the philosophies/theories that you would assign that label to and not in the misguided sense of relativism as arbitrarity; basically continental philosophy, frankfurt school (e.g. adorno horkheimer, habermas) and the french (e.g. foucault, derrida, deleuze (& guattari))
Of course there were also absolutism, colonialism, the jacobines, nazism & facism, to name just a few. Part of western values, from my perspective at least, is an implicit promise, that what happened in the 20th century with facism was the darkest hour, so to speak-> never again
US Data Privacy is not sufficient.
For what? Does the EU not want to spy on its citizens? That strikes me as... unlikely.
Why not host in east asia? Or southeast asia? Or south america? Or africa? Then you avoid both the government with incentive to spy on you (assuming you live in the EU) and american companies.
EU member *countries" certainly do, but that's true of all countries that have the ability.
If anything the EU puts limits on what EU member countries and companies can do. By hosting in one of the EU countries you have stronger legal guarantees on data privacy than in any other area. A possible exception is Switzerland (not a EU member), which historically has had even stronger privacy laws, though these have been weakened recently IIRC.
> Does the EU not want to spy on its citizens?
You do not seem to understand what the EU is. It is not a country, it does not have a police or anything like the NSA.
I think it's interesting that people write off open weight models because they're "a few months behind" proprietary models.
I know LLMs move at the speed of light (especially these past few quarters), but if Opus and GPT "a few months ago" were really like open weight models, then there's really no reason to not switch, especially for those who were using these models a few months ago.
Your codebase didn't change, so use the open weight model. Don't move the goalposts.
Every new proprietary model is "groundbreaking" and "look, it just solved task X that no other model could solve," only to be referred to as "that crappy previous-generation model" a month later.
So yeah, I'm totally fine using Kimi-2.7, GLM-5.2 or Deepseek-v4. I think we've already hit the ceiling and most improvements now seem to be from harness improvements and slightly better RL to improve reasoning/tool calling.
Not only that, but to me it seems that after a week the intelligence is being downscaled or routed. Maybe because of lack of capacity
There's at least the possibility that they intentionally degrade the models as time passes. We can't really verify that we're getting what we're paying for all of the time. All the more reason to invest in local inference.
What if the new model is exactly as good as the last model on launch day but better than the last model was on the new model's launch day because it was degraded? Every single time?
Makes me think of [shepherd tones](Shepard tone - Wikipedia https://share.google/xooRbF7wIIhcsTt2J) which sounds like they're rising in pitch indefinitely
There are lots of benchmarks to compare the absolute values of different models on the same scale (as opposed to vibes (my apologies for the shorthand), etc.).
The thought has definitely crossed my mind. I don't think it's true because there's definitely an improvement when new models are released.
Maybe the truth is the newest models aren't actually as impressive as we thought. Maybe our perception of progress is being manipulated via months of gradual, silent and unverifiable degradation.
Unless what you're getting is really explicitly spelled out in a contract, you should flatly assume that they're doing whatever they like whenever they like.
Even if it's in the contract, but can't be verified.
People talk about this a lot. What I have never seen is a discussion of methods they might employ to degrade the models.
Let’s say I’m a bad faith LLM operator, and I want to degrade my model so the next release looks better and people want to switch to the more expensive one. How would I do that?
They would quantize the model. That'd make it cheaper to run, and have slightly worse output but it would still generate outputs with a similar feel, derived from a compressed version of the same knowledge base etc.
They wouldn't even need to do this uniformly, quantized versions of the model could be routed only a subset of the requests. They could do this to nerf the old model, or more likely just to give themselves more hardware to run the new one on by handling more requests on less hardware. Or to handle increased request volume as traffic ramps up faster than hardware can be provisioned.
Playing with local models at various quants, the degradation can be hard to spot. Sometimes it's only noticeable in aggregate. And even then, you never really know if you just got unlucky with a bad response due to RNG.
I've had Opus 4.6 fall into some weirdly incoherent loops that I rarely see from even Sonnet, that felt like the kind of thing I got frequently with Qwen3.5 9B on local. And the above applies... Was that just bad RNG? Or was my request to Opus routed to some lower quality variant? There's no great way for me to tell for any given request, nor any way to guarantee Anthropic _didn't_ do that.
I have had the same experiences you've had with 4.6 and it was ever since they brought out 4.7. It's fairly obvious they're doing something like you've said here.
Forgot to mention, but it was after the 4.7 release when I was still using 4.6 that I saw those loops too... Before that, 4.6 had been a pretty seamless experience.
Weight quantization, n-expert capping, routing to smaller model, context window truncation, aggressive sampling constraints, lossy speculative decoding and probably more.
I'm pretty sure you could do n-expert capping on any MoE model with only a handful lines of changes to ik_llama.cpp, but yeah... my bet is the have various quantisations and run the lower ones at peak (along with different system prompts i.e we're GPU-bound right now. Get to the point with less chatter)
Use quantisation.
At current prices, and considering these OS Models' performance, investing in local inference sounds like a bad idea.
Current prices are insane but at this point I'm starting to feel like it's an existential issue. I'm not a US citizen. At any point the USA could come up with some arbitrary export controls. Not having a computer capable of running at least Qwen is starting to actually seem risky to me.
At least it's going to be usable as a very high end gaming PC.
Why would you buy and build everything before the low probability catastrophe strikes, though? You don’t get any benefit from switching early and you pay a big opportunity cost.
> low probability catastrophe
There is also a low probability that someone enters peace negotiations solely to threaten the negotiators with death, yet here we are. With these guys it is: Better safe than sorry.
because as soon as it strikes computer hardware will be completely unavailable to buy?
Also, there's a nontrivial learning curve involved in running your own inference server, once you move past the casual-goofing-around-with-llama-server stage. If you care about not being a sharecropper on Sam's or Dario's plantation, you should consider learning the ropes. Even if you don't put these skills to immediate use in your day job.
I didn't appreciate this until I started down that road myself.
> If you care about not being a sharecropper on Sam's or Dario's plantation
Couldn't have put it better myself. That's what all this comes down to. Owning the hardware, owning the inference. Not perpetually renting them out on a meter like in the dystopian future they're envisioning.
Because you will not be the only one struggling to get the hardware in the "unlikely" case the POTUS blurts out another fart.
> At any point the USA could come up with some arbitrary export controls
lol his already happened with Fable!
At current "proprietary inference company behavior," investing in local inference sounds like the exceedingly far more rational option.
Long term predictability ought to far outweigh a few more cycles of performance.
There's also a lot of benchmark trickery going on, it's becoming harder to see how the latest models really improved.
The top models also seem to have inconsistent performance depending on the time of day and how far we are from the next release.
I’m an LLM fan, but from an engineering perspective the idea of building atop services that palpably fluctuate in capacity, performance, and capability is nutty.
Even with minor automation I feel like I can watch OpenAI and Anthropic engineers fiddling in real-time. Tuesdays behaviour changes by Thursday, 10AMs production isn’t possible at 11:30AM. Nutty.
I chilled significantly on using Google for anything to do with business due to API (and offering) stability. (Still use Google for personal things.) But AI models seem orders of magnitude more fluid, so to my risk-averse eye, they're nothing I'd base my own business on.
Since I started running my own inference server, I've had zero degradation that I didn't do myself. Basically the only time I see it get worse is if I drop one of the quants.
Which is what I suspect the providers are doing to fit more inference on the same amount of hardware over time.
Interesting, Claude might be doing better since I last checked:
https://marginlab.ai/trackers/claude-code-historical-perform...
There were at least a couple of these degradation trackers.
Agreed
Correct. Anything else is pure marketing and you have fallen for it.
> I think it's interesting that people write off open weight models because they're "a few months behind" proprietary models
I experiment a lot with the open models and I’m getting tired of this trope. I’m not yet convinced that even the best open weight models are equal to Opus from “a few months” ago.
I know what the benchmarks say. I had higher hopes. My real experience just doesn’t match the benchmarks.
I also do a lot of work that even Opus 4.8 struggles with. When even the cutting edge LLMs aren’t all the way there yet, my motivation to switch to something even further behind just isn’t there.
Have you found anything specific that the full-precision quant of GLM 5.2 can't do that Opus 4.8 can? I haven't, so far.
5.2 lives up to the hype. I don't find it to be the best at anything except coding. But for coding... yeah, it lives up to the hype. Not quite Opus 4.8-level, but I would feel comfortable comparing it to 4.5, at least if it had vision capabilities.
I would love if you could make some examples
> My real experience just doesn’t match the benchmarks.
That's exactly the problem I have... with Anthropic and "Open""AI"
To be a little bit more precise than "a few months behind", what probably matters is before or after "Claude Opus 4.5 from Nov 24, 2025". That was the model which started the OpenClaw hype over Christmas.
The only reason I'm on HN right now reading this post is because the Anthropic's API is down... so there's another point for self hosted.
We have a provider with Deepseek V4 flash at our work. It can handle 95% of the "actually functional" workload at a tenth of the cost. I still pull up beefier ones sometimes, but that's after some consideration.
The moat is so flat, it only gives +1 food and +1 production. +1 gold with a road.
Same, i feel that V4 Flash is great at task implementation, but im still looking at bigger models for design. Now, GLM 5.2 with high thinking is actually getting really close now. I have switched for all personal projects right now and am quite happy with the results. I think the magic is in the big context window (1m) + a lot of thinking gets us very close to at least Opus 4.6 level. Im currently running directly on z.ai with a lite coding plan, and have bought API credit on deekseek as well. I will be looking at EU based hosts next and then i might switch over some of the more critical flows.
Intelligence is maybe a few months behind. But cost sadly is further behind. GLM-5.2 has a deceptively high cost during day-to-day usage for e.g. coding because 1) it has to think a ton more than GPT-5.5/Opus-4.8 to get to competitive results; 2) many providers are still figuring out caching; and 3) API pricing for Codex/Claude can be as high as 40x more than subscription pricing, which distorts the market.
For that matter, the new models are shit. If I’m using Opus 4.6 anyway to get anything actually done, then great, we’re actually entirely caught up then.
The reason for me is work pays for Github Copilot which doesn't have these open modals.
> I think it's interesting that people write off open weight models because they're "a few months behind" proprietary models.
The really interesting thing is that it's typically those very same accounts who were explaining, a few months ago, that thanks to their commercial model they were gaining so much time and producing so much fantastic code.
A few months passes and suddenly the open-source model have caught up with the models that were gaining them so much time and that produced amazing code (in production everywhere for sure btw) but... It's impossible to work with these models.
Rinse and repeat.
The current models, according to them, are basically AGI and they can go fishing while paid subscriptions solve the world's problems.
But when it six months there shall be new closed, pricey, models and when the open ones shall have reach the level of Fable, we'll hear how it's impossible to work in late 2026 on a model that is "only at the level of Fable".
These people should have been snake-oil salesmen (and it could be what they actually are).
My most charitable interpretation that there's some honeymoon effect for each release, and people genuinely feel very productive and useful for 2-3 months. By the time the next big model release happens they've seen some issues or run into something that makes them feel like the new model will fix all that and improve their flow so much, etc.
Not unusual in the tech space, but this has been basically constantly happening for two years now? I can't imagine the improvements are more than incremental at this point.
They are generally referred to as the Kool-Aid drinkers. There's always something holding them back from open models. It's no different than the argument in the article. I've been daily driving Linux for well over 20 years at this point and while things have gotten easier they haven't gotten that much easier. There's always been a distro that's focused on new users or ease of use. I used to take for granted the Linux distro ecosystem but now worry how Microsoft, Apple and others will continue to try and legislate compute into a corner. I can appreciate good engineering, but when I look at OS X and Windows they're both failing end users in different ways.
Just like the OS ecosystem I think we'll see a similar trajectory with OAI, Anthropic and Google but on a much accelerated time scale. I think the lobbying has begun to lock in their fate for revenue - because none of them give a shit about their users. I do hope, however, that Anthropic continues to over rotate and continue to gimp their models into uselessness. I just asked Opus 4.8 the other day to look at some code as an adversary and summarize areas that should be addressed. Nothing specific and it shut down the conversation. However starting a new prompt and prodding the model from a different angle yielded the results I asked for directly. Pick a lane. Or, don't and continue to lose industry respect and consideration.
Even just one of the smaller models is good enough for the grunt work I use them for 90% of the time. Currently doing most of my home hobby projects with OpenCode Go and Qwen 3.7 Plus, it's not great at diagnosing issues in the code, but if I can clearly articulate a test suite or boilerplate refactoring it works fine.
ok but your competition using the latest models has an advantage
not all of us are doing noob shit lol
You're being entirely unreasonable. 640 kilobytes of memory was enough for Bill Gates, and yet somehow your special project needs more?
Heh, if you're using LLMs heavily for work I think odds are pretty good you're doing pretty trivial stuff. It might not be trivial to you, but you're probably just not very good at this.
I find the attitude shown in this post very surprising. On the one hand, the post starts with a story of adopting Linux and other FOSS. The core of FOSS is giving its users the ability to understand and modify software they run. On the other hand, the rest of the post is about using a tool (LLM) that the author has no way to modify and no way to understand. Huge matrices of floats are at best comparable to compiled code. But the reality is even worse - it’s actually easier to decompile and understand proprietary software. Not to mention the fact the most of the time users can’t even run the “open” models since it requires hardware that most can’t afford.
How did we get from prising software freedoms to this?
What's amazing about these models is they are effectively a distillation of the internet in something that can fit onto your local machine [1] and be queried via natural language.
[1] It seems inevitable that decent local models will be possible as the technology and the hardware is improving at a rate beyond the growth of the knowledge base to be distilled.
Headline: "The is minimal downside"
Article: "I’m hoping it’s going to be minimal"
It was easy to be a rebel and use Linux when it was clearly competent, but needed hacks and extra elbow grease to get it polished for use. IME, the open models are “not there yet” in terms of capability or operational needs. Sure, GLM5.2 looks competent, but I will only be able to get it to run that competent if I had a huge cluster of GPUs.. if I am accessing an open model via hosted API, I might as well run a closed model via hosted API. The incentives fall apart in comparison to using Linux 15 years ago.
Don’t get me wrong. I wish I could run a local model and be happy about it. At the moment, I’m not.
> if I am accessing an open model via hosted API, I might as well run a closed model via hosted API.
uh.. no?
The whole thing is that it cannot be enshittified, because there's not just a single party having control over it.
As it has happened, is happening and will happen.
With open weights, you cannot easily be rugpulled or locked out or any of that stuff. If the corp attempts that, someone else with an server farm will gladly take you as a customer with absolutely 0 changes to your workflow other than swapping out the API URL + Key.
You'll be talking to the same model with the same personality and same knowledge.
There are downsides depending on how good is your harness. Switching the model is easy enough. Ensuring that the harness continues working the way it did is a completely different thing. This is not just about the prompts but also general behaviour around the model and its infrastructure.
So while it is not complicated and certainly something that can be solved, it is not plug and play.
That being said, we switch to open weight models earlier this month and the results has been more than positive so far. The cost savings are also hard to dismiss.
Claude started becoming useful for my coding purposes after it hit version 4.6. After that sure some nice to have additions but I think if I had 4.6 sonnet & opus as open weights, I would not need something more.
Having played a bit with Fable, reinforced the above.
The headline says one thing, then the article text says this:
> I’m hoping it’s going to be minimal.
I have multiple subscriptions and I pay per token to try out different LLM providers through OpenRouter. I also run open weight models locally.
I just can’t agree yet. The models from Anthropic and OpenAI really are that much better than anything else. The open weight models must be universally benchmaxxed across the board because my real world experience with them is very different than what the benchmarks imply. I get downvoted a lot for speaking about my experience because I don’t think it’s the reality that people want to hear right now, but it’s true for complex work.
I do think there are a lot of easier tasks that can be handled appropriately by the open weight models in the hands of a skilled operator. If an entire job is simple enough that you wouldn’t hesitate to hand it off to a junior with a little supervision then any model will do. However for a lot of the work I do, even Opus 4.8 on Max requires a lot of attention and extra steering and review to keep it on track. Fable did, too, though to a lesser degree. When I try to use the big open weight models (hosted, because they’re not running at reasonable speeds locally at a quantization I can tolerate) it feels like I spend more time waiting while they burn tokens for output that I probably have to reject anyway, at least for the bigger tasks. I wish they were there, but that’s not the case yet.
Do you have any example?
I’ve been wanting to get better acquainted with local inference but I don’t have the hardware, which has made me think about something I haven’t seen discussed, which is local collaboratives. The economics makes it seem like a group of people joining together to run good hardware and an open model might make sense, but I haven’t seen anything like this mentioned. Have I been missing it?
I think it would be pretty neat to launch a service helping people who wanted to participate in something like that locate one another.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48524387
There are plenty of providers of open models that offer very affordable rates. Generally, I recommend looking at OpenRouter since they track various metrics for the various providers.
The reason you don't see more of this is because everyone does the math, realizes it's not a good deal, and then gives up on the idea.
There's a post at the top of /r/localllama about this exact math right now: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1ubrcwj/tokenom...
TL;DR: Running GLM 5.2 is going to cost about $20K minimum, and that's going to be painfully slow compared to the cloud hosted versions. Even the estimates where the server is computing tokens 24/7 you can't break even for several years.
The only reason to run locally is if complete data privacy is your top concern. You pay a high premium for that.
I mean sure, I’d you’re attempting to run the biggest possible models, it’s going to require a stupid amount of compute? I thought we all knew this?
The appeal to me is that we can run that, but we can also run smaller models on your laptop _and it’s functional!_ I can run DeepSeek v4 flash and a qwen 3.6 on my laptop! Thats crazy good.
Open models hosted in Cloud???
AWS Bedrock hosts Gemma 4 31B and this is The Best Deal – hands down. Try it. Vertex also has Gemma 4 MoE version. Not "lobotomised" by quants. There are also GLM (latest) and Qwen / DS (but these two are not latest versions)
Sure. But OpenAI is the same price. Why would I pay $18/month for z.ai when OpenAI is $20/month?
One big advantage I’ve found — people get attached to models (including me). With open models if you find one that works perfectly for you but the next version doesn’t, you can run the old one forever (or someone will for you)
But… the models will fall behind. As libraries and languages and tool calling updates or the world knowledge changes, the models decay.
Personally, I don’t like the change, but it’s just how technology works so I’d rather move with the flow than try to stick my foot down and freeze time.
> But… the models will fall behind.
Yes but why does that matter? If I am happy with its capabilities now, I will continue being happy with its capabilities in the future.
Yes, it cannot do the newest magic shit, but why does that matter? It can still do everything that existed up until that point, which is _a lot_.
Eventually, you might also need something new, but it's not like the world shifts over all problems that exist from <old> to <new> and any tech for <old> problems suddenly becomes obsolete?
ideally, the software produced should include the latest security patches.
If the model prefers a version of Ruby or node with an RCE, I guess you can burn tokens to teach the model how to avoid the introducing the vulnerability into your code?
That feels quite tedious and token inefficient..
I'm sorry, but.. are you being serious?
Yes. Yes. The only way one can write secure software is by always using the latest SOTA model. Anything else is inefficient and vulnerable.
I hate this platform
No problem, "AI" will just write its own frameworks and libs then!
This is a good point I never thought of. I appreciate it.
OpenCode Go is $10/month and the limits are much more generous than those or Codex
One reason might be request limits. OpenAI's ChatGPT Plus w/Codex ($20/month) provides a worst-case 5-hour-request-limit of 15 for GPT-5.5, 20 for GPT-5.4, 60 for GPT-5.4-Mini. Whereas Z.ai Lite ($18/month) provides a worst-case of ~80 for GLM 5.2 (off-peak; on-peak is 2am-6am New York time). So Z.ai can provide higher limits for a cheaper price. (https://codeberg.org/mutablecc/calculate-ai-cost/src/branch/...)
Subscriptions are done. By the end of 2026 everyone will be paying for actual mils of tokens consumed, via API calls.
the pricing page doesn't seem to call it out anymore, but the claim on z.ai coding plan used to be 3x the usage of the equivalent-price claude plan. whether that's accurate i don't know, but just based on api pricing GLM is way cheaper.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48618455
I pay month to month.
While I agree with some of the gist of the article, 2 remarks:
1. Unfortunatly in my tests the open models do not (yet?) rival, at least Claude Opus, for software development/engineering and adjacent tasks.
2. Enjoy while it lasts. I'll be genuinly amazed these open models will not be declared 'illegal' under some security pretense by the end of the year. And I say 'pretense' because the primary driver will be regulatory capture and industry protectionism.
Banning models in US just strengthens competing states, ie. China.
It seems the best self-hosted and the worst models served by big providers has some considerable overlap in quality.
Whatever reason people have to run those (cheaper? backwards compatibility once you get something running) surely applies to the open models too, maybe even more so.
Have you read about Opencode Go? They are great provider for open model, like GLM 5.2, Deepseek v4 Pro, Kimi 2.7 Code. You should give it shot to them :-)
The amount the HN community, at least from what I’ve seen, is sleeping on OpenCode Go (and zen) is kind of amazing.
$10 a month gets you generous usage with the best open weight models and they claim to have zero retention and not to train on your usage.
It’s unclear to me what the advantages of openrouter are but it seems to be a default I see many people talking about here.
> It’s unclear to me what the advantages of openrouter are but it seems to be a default I see many people talking about here.
The advantage of OpenRouter compared to using API providers directly is that you can switch between API providers without binding your money to a single provider.
The advantage of OpenRouter compared to OpenCode Go is that the price for DeepSeek-V4-Pro and MiMo-V2.5-Pro is better on OpenRouter.
For example, DeepSeek costs $0.435/0.87/0.003625 for 1M in/out/cached tokens (https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-pro), compared to an equivalent of $1.74/3.48/0.0145 under the OpenCode Go plan (https://opencode.ai/docs/go/#usage-limits), almost exactly 4x.
But since you get a monthly usage limit of $60 with the OpenCode Go plan for $10 (i.e. 6x), you might still come out ahead if you use it a lot (or use other models, where the pricing difference is smaller or non-existent).
I guess this will happen soon. There are two catalysts needed for this to happen:
1. Evals that can quickly tell you how much downside there is to switching 2. Something like OpenRouter that can help you run those evals quickly
Now #2 is starting to become popular, and I think we'll soon see more people adopting a model-agnostic approach. Of course, there will still be high-intelligence use cases where nothing comes close to Claude or GPT.
Exactly. I'm very happy the discourse has moved on from "but X model is the best" to "you can use open models".
Whether you're using SDK or harness based agents, having evals means you're able to modify any part of your agent and still know what satisfies your "good enough".
It's great for designing products that are easy to change as well.
Any tips on which model to use and how to use them? I have 64 RAM and 16 VRAM (I know it's not a lot, it's a gaming GPU) and I'm trying to find a good model to use but it's a bit of a struggle
Open source models are still not good enough for now, but with the current speed of one new SOTA every two months, by this time next year we will definitely have cheap open source models at least as good as Fable :)
I don't think we will. The open model labs are too resource constrained to approach Fable or even Opus on the general case and I don't see that changing within a year.
Right now, due to profound shortfalls in both data and hardware compared to the US labs, the OSS models are IMO basically technology demonstrators that in practise are even more jagged than the US labs' efforts. The high points of the jaggedness are close - but number of happy paths is many times fewer, and their behaviour inside the harness is far less refined. Barring some incredible breakthrough I don't think that is changing without a much higher level of resources - which seems impossible given the current hardware environment.
I have no reason to think that Anthropic or OpenAI are in possession of some secret sauce that the Chinese labs can't duplicate given the right resources, but the fact remains that absent those resources they'll remain behind. Barring some incredible bombshell reveal from Huawei I don't think this asymmetry resolves in a year. In three years it may well be a different story.
deepseek-v4-pro, probably the representative cheap opensouce LLM, was released in 2026.4 One year before, what OAI had in hand was gpt-4.1 and gpt-o3. I think it is not very controversial to say that deepseek is stronger than them, at most you can point to some post-training problems, basically the instability you mentioned. Also I am not sure if it is because the people who are best at using AI -- the people making AI -- get more development speed as the models get smarter, but my feeling is model progress is getting faster and faster. GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 were almost one year apart. The disadvantage from hardware limits and compute shortage is visible from the size of chinese models. glm-5.2, which is claimed to be around opus-4.6 level in coding, is only 744B. But Chinese engineers are obviously, how to put it, getting very effective results on "performance at the same size". And that is not even talking about the advantages from China's electricity, manpower, or even "national will" to compete against America. So saying it may take three years to catch up with a gap that is now only several months looks too pessimistic. ChatGPT itself was released only three and a half years ago, and today is already a completely different world.
You may be right, and I certainly hope so!
But the question was about whether the Chinese labs will have fable-equivalence in 1 year. I am by no means some kind of insider, but knowing the vaguest outlines of what went into Mythos, they just can't do it. The compute is not there. The Chinese engineers are incredible, but they're not literal magicians.
Of course there could be something incredible to come out of left field and overturn the apple cart yet again, but that's speculation. It would be awesome, sure! But I wouldn't bet too heavily on it.
And FWIW - again, no disrespect at all to the Chinese engineers but I don't rate GLM5.2 as being even close to opus 4.6. It can hit a few benchmarks, sure, that's the top edge of the "jag". But filling in the rest of the capabilities - again, it takes compute and data the OSS labs just don't have, that anyone knows about at least.
OK, now what? Someone offers open models as a service? That's basically a time-sharing computing business - people at terminals sharing remote computing resources. If you buy your own H100 it will be idle while you're typing or reading or thinking. So sharing makes sense.
But it doesn't have to be an "AI company". It's just a compute service. The companies that offer web hosting could get into this.
> The companies that offer web hosting could get into this.
They already do. DigitalOcean is one of the providers on OpenRouter, for example
What open models are "recommended"?
I like the Linux analogy, I struggled with Linux way back.
I think the frontier will command premium for sometime just as slight better software developers were 10x's vs their peers as their architecture & development strategies and code approach compounded quickly. One less error per block of work compounds quickly.
Sure, there may be some cases and reasons for local models and industry is so large they will continue to make progress and gather economic value and users for specific use case; but frontier will command vast majority of the economic value distinct from Linux and open source where the model created better than proriatary economic incentives around development
10x developers were not slightly better than their peers, they were vastly superior and faster. OTOH, the lead of frontier llms is diminishing as training is getting diminishing returns.
Also, on that note. Not every company needs 10x developers, just as not every task needs frontier llms. Ultimately, operating costs will be the largest contributing factor.
Youre clutching at straws.
Ultimately its a financial game. Open source is far cheaper so it already has an upper-hand. Frontier models have to justify financially why they are worth the additional spend.
Is it just me or is half the article missing?
I enjoyed the first part though
I am absolutely pro local and true open source models.
Personally I haven't seen any productivity gain since Opus 4.5 times.
But: I can't fully get behind the opinion that (so called) "open source models" are simply superior and will be in the future, because when I asked some models who they are, they answered with "I am Claude from Anthropic", which could mean they have been trained by exfiltrating Claude.
I have NO moral objection to this, as Anthropic and "Open""AI".also trained their models on anything they could get their hands on.
It's more about the question: can and will these models be updated, even if Anthropic et al fail. Who's gonna pay for training then? What's their incentive? Have we reached a plateau?
But, what model are you using?
and what hardware are you using?
yeah, on a 96GB Mac Studio and Gemma+Qwen, it's definitely fully doable. fully doable but not really for coding on 16GB. but svelter models and cheaper (eventually) hardware are coming!
"cheaper (eventually) hardware" Best case 2-3 years from now. Otherwise it will take a major global recession to get us anywhere near last year's prices.
Macs are expensive hardware, but I'm always seeing people running LLMs on them. Is anyone running on cheaper generic hardware and Linux?
A Mac is cheaper than a high end GPU with the same amount of RAM.
And use less power
ah, right, so it's about Apple Silicon being fast enough to use instead of a GPU?
They use the GPU but an Apple Silicon GPU has the same high speed access to all the RAM on the machine as the CPU does, rather than having its own walled-off maybe 16 GB VRAM in mainstream gaming GPUs or 24 GB in RTX 4090 or RTX 5090 (MSRP $1999 but in practice $3000-$4000 at the moment). Nvidia A100 (80GB VRAM) apparently cost $15,000 or so.
Not only does Apple's unified memory give the GPU more RAM to use, but it also eliminates copying things between CPU RAM and GPU RAM.
A Mac Mini with 48 GB RAM costs $1799. A Mac Studio with 96 GB RAM is $3999 — until March you could get a Mac Studio with 512 GB RAM for $3999, all of which could be used for your AI model.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/apple-pulls-512-m...
Some are coming up used at silly prices.
https://www.trademe.co.nz/a/marketplace/computers/desktops/a...
NB NZ$44,999 is "only" US$25,772.
I suspect hosted and local will converge when hardware prices come down and API prices go up. The massive rate of datacenter build out will be unsustainable. Right now the hosted models are massively cheaper than buying the hardware and running it yourself which signals that hosted is very subsidized.
If you don't have that hardware thr math of buying a depreciating computer is challenging if you are satisfied with the $100/month plans ($1200/year). A 96GB Mac Studio is ~$4k. I think if you have the hardware already as a sunk cost then yes it makes sense. But I'm not sure it is worth spending $4k for today's hardware vs waiting for newer hardware in a few years.
I think once the hardware process comes down and these mini DGXs become cheaper, and by then open models still be smaller and better, there is going to be less and less reason to use the providers. CEOs are already complaining that they are costing too much. There are also large organisations like Banks which can't use external services and are already looking at internal housing. it's a good thing so the big AI companies just went IPO as once the self hosting trend kicks in they are going bust.
>There was a time not too long ago when using Linux entailed some professional risk1. First there was compatibility: you may not have been able to render a Word document or PowerPoint correctly, and you might have had to trust Open Office’s export capability to render docs the way you wanted
For a while during this era, I used to port my laptops windows installation into a virtual machine that can run on Linux. It took a bit of hacking away but I could usually do it in a day or two. Then its all Linux with the windows vm being used for the microsoft stuff.
I know open models have gotten quite good in many tasks such as coding or composition, but are there any that can access the internet and retrieve data like ChatGPT, Claude, etc can?
I do have to admit I have recently begun wishing I could pay five dollars a month for a "just answer the fucking question" plan that would give me results without the guardrails and without the constant simpering and ego-stroking. I keep finding myself going a quick evaluation of "is it faster for me to skim search results myself or to construct an elaborate narrative to make an AI give me a real answer".
That's why I like qwen3.6 27B, it has 0 ego, it knows that it doesn't have complete world knowledge, so when it sees a web_search tool it searches all the time. Even qwen3.5 9B is mostly search-eager (but given the size, it's weaker on reasoning on the results if that's needed). I use a stock pi harness with only web_search and web_fetch (cleans up the html to only keep text) tools defined.
I have given up on making Opus actually retrieve online information for me. At this point I only query it side by side with qwen to laugh at how it didn't even attempt to search properly, and how a small local model is beating it every time. Gemini is very fast for searching, but somehow miss-sources all the time.
There are tons of existing Skills/MCPs for Google/Kagi/whatever search, and making your own is trivial. I gave DeepSeek in Pi a link to Kagi API docs and asked it to add a web search skill, and it did that easily.
> I know open models have gotten quite good in many tasks such as coding or composition, but are there any that can access the internet and retrieve data like ChatGPT, Claude, etc can?
The things you describe are just tool calling, they're a feature of whatever harness you use. Use OpenCode, pi.dev, or maki.sh with any of the open models.
> I do have to admit I have recently begun wishing I could pay five dollars a month for a "just answer the fucking question" plan that would give me results without the guardrails and without the constant simpering and ego-stroking. I keep finding myself going a quick evaluation of "is it faster for me to skim search results myself or to construct an elaborate narrative to make an AI give me a real answer".
You can do most of this with some system prompts added to whatever agent you're using. You can do it from the settings on the claude/chatgpt websites too. (minus the no-guardrails thing)
What are good resources and forums where I can figure out these system prompts to bypass guardrails, atleast on agents?
Just go to kimi.com and try for yourself (not affiliated, but happy user).
First time I did this I realized in 5 seconds that the big players weren’t going to be carving up the market between them.
You can let the AI solve it itself, and then it will provide two solutions: implement a local search service (easily blocked), or purchase a Web Search API service
isn't that just in the harness?
As someone that has pretty powerful desktop that I've been using with local open weight models, people are far exaggerating the quality of them. Some of them are now useful. They don't compare yet to the online models of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc. They are still about 18 months behind. I have accomplished useful work with them, like image classification on Gemma4, but they are much much slower, much much more expensive and they don't scale at all.
A $10,000 RTX 6000 Blackwell card will pay for 500 months of Claude or Codex, which is 40 years worth of compute. Obviously they are going to raise their prices, my prediction being to $200-500/month, but that still makes them at least years of compute and they scale very well with more traffic. Single GPUs do not, they are pegged at 100% and good luck getting it to answer multiple queries at the same time.
Imagine taking 6 months longer to release your cookie cutter CRUD app.