Live data from Hacker News

Developers are choosing older AI models

augmentcode.com

31–40 of 179 posts

Re: Developers are choosing older AI models

#31
Even for non-developer use cases o3 is a much better model for me than GPT5 on any setting.

30 seconds-1 minute is just the time I am patient enough to wait as that's the time I am spending on writing a question.

Faster models just make too many mistakes / don't understand the question.

Re: Developers are choosing older AI models

#34
post #11

Seems to completely ignore usage of local/free models as well as anything but Sonnet/ChatGPT. So my confidence in the good faith of the author is... heavily restricted.

Most people can’t affort the GPUs for local models if you want to get close to cloud capabilities.

The more recent LLMs work fine on an M1 mac. Can't speak for Windows/Linux.

There was even a recent release of Granite4 that runs on a Raspberry Pi.

https://github.com/Jewelzufo/granitepi-4-nano

For my local work I use Ollama. (M4 Max 128GB)

- gpt-oss. 20b or 120b depending on complexity of use cases.

- granite4 for speed and lower complexity (around the same as gpt20b).

Re: Developers are choosing older AI models

#35
post #24
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people can’t affort the GPUs for local models if you want to get close to cloud capabilities.

A 4090 has 24GB of VRAM allowing you to run a 22B model entirely in memory at FP8 and 24B models at Q6_K (~19GB). A 5090 has 32GB of VRAM allowing you to run a 32B model in memory at Q6_K. You can run larger models by splitting the GPU layers that are run in VRAM vs stored in RAM. That is slower, but still viable. This means that you can run the Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B model locally on a 4090 or 5090. That model is a Mix…

How much context do you get with 2GB of leftover VRAM on Nvidia GPU?

Re: Developers are choosing older AI models

#36

GPT5 is HELLISHLY slow. That's all there is to it. It loves doing a whole bunch of reasoning steps and prolaim how mucf of a very good job it did clearing up its own todo steps and all that mumbo jumbo, but at the end of the day, I only asked it a small piece of information about nginx try_files that even GPT3 could answer instantly. Maybe before you make reasoning models that go on funny little sidequests wher they…

> It loves doing a whole bunch of reasoning steps

If you are talking about local models, you can switch that off. The reasoning is a common technique now to improve the accuracy of the output where the question is more complex.

Re: Developers are choosing older AI models

#37

Seems to completely ignore usage of local/free models as well as anything but Sonnet/ChatGPT. So my confidence in the good faith of the author is... heavily restricted.

I think it's also true for many local models. People still use NeMo, QwQ, Llama3 for use cases that fit them despite there being replacements that do better on "benchmarks". Not to mention relics like BERT that are still tuned for classification even today. ML models always have weird behaviours and a successor is unlikely to be better in literally every way, once you have something that works well enough it's hard to upgrade without facing different edge cases.

Inference for new releases is routinely bugged for at least a month or two as well, depending on how active the devs of a specific inference engine are and how much model creators collaborate. Personally, I hate how data from GPT's few week (and arguably somewhat ongoing) sycophancy rampage has leaked into datasets that are used for training local models, making a lot of new LLM releases insufferable to use.

Re: Developers are choosing older AI models

#38
post #24
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people can’t affort the GPUs for local models if you want to get close to cloud capabilities.

A 4090 has 24GB of VRAM allowing you to run a 22B model entirely in memory at FP8 and 24B models at Q6_K (~19GB). A 5090 has 32GB of VRAM allowing you to run a 32B model in memory at Q6_K. You can run larger models by splitting the GPU layers that are run in VRAM vs stored in RAM. That is slower, but still viable. This means that you can run the Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B model locally on a 4090 or 5090. That model is a Mix…

That's out of touch for 90% of developers worldwide

Re: Developers are choosing older AI models

#40
I don't get the point of this post. Personally, I think that the thinking process is essential for accurate tool usage. Whenever I interact with Claude family models, either on a web chat or via a coding agent CLI, I believe that this thinking process is what makes Claude more accurate in using tools.

It could be true that newer models just produce more tokens seemingly out of no reasons. But with the increasing number of tool definitions, in the long run, I think it will pay off.

Just a few days ago, I read "Interleaved Thinking Unlocks Reliable MiniMax-M2 Agentic Capability"[1]. I think they have a valid point that this thinking process has significance as we are moving towards agents.

[1] https://www.minimax.io/news/why-is-interleaved-thinking-impo...

Post reply on HN