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Outsourcing plus local AI will soon become more economical vs. frontier labs

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Re: Outsourcing plus local AI will soon become more economical vs. frontier labs

#181

Post by stymaar »

Chyzwar wrote: post #173
stymaar wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lastly, there is a massive difference in capabilities, determinism, and error handling between 5T SOTA models like Opus What's your source for Opus being a 5T model? > and tiny distillations from DeepSeek that perform well only in benchmarks. I don't think you know what you're talking about. Local models aren't “distillations from Deepseek”. And they don't perform well “only in benchmarks”, Qwen 3.6 is a very decen…

https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.24827 From this paper

That's not what the paper says though:

    Claude Opus 4.6 Anthropic 68.0% ∼5.3T [1.8–15.6T]
    Claude Opus 4.7 Anthropic 66.4% ∼4.0T [1.4–12.0T]
    Claude Opus 4.5 Anthropic 65.2% ∼3.4T [1.1–10.0T]
    Claude Opus 4.1 Anthropic 64.9% ∼3.2T [1.1–9.5T]
    Claude Opus 4 Anthropic 59.7% ∼1.4T [478B–4.2T
According to their estimation, Opus is likely between 1T and 15T, which really doesn't tell you much that you couldn't have guessed otherwise. It doesn't say “Opus is a 5T model”.

The fact that there's absolutely no consistency in the predicted size between models from the same lab should tell you all you need about the predictive power of this method (and they aren't really lying about their numbers, their confidence interval is huge enough to fit anything in it, but their prose is making very strong claims out of their statistical nothingburger).

(somebody already posted this paper earlier, and I spent some time reading it, and this paper is really not that good even though there are a bunch of interesting ideas in it).

Re: Outsourcing plus local AI will soon become more economical vs. frontier labs

#182

Post by jyounker »

The problem with outsourcing, as opposed to remote developers, is that it takes a really good manager and tech lead to make it work.

My experience is that you have to write extremely detailed design documents and work specifications in order to get effective results. These generally have to be as detailed as most effective prompts.

Once you've written specs that detailed, why do you need outsourced developers and frontier models?

Re: Outsourcing plus local AI will soon become more economical vs. frontier labs

#183

Post by eikenberry »

ecshafer wrote: post #67

I have really been trying to get local models to work. I have tried different harnesses, tooling, skills, prompts, etc. But when I compare claude code with anthropic models or codex with gpt 5.5, vs qwen, glm or gemma and the same harnesses, the frontier models come out massively ahead. I am at the point where I just don't see the point of the non-frontier models, they waste more time than they save.

The point is to not indenture yourself to a corporation whose motives do not align with your own.

Re: Outsourcing plus local AI will soon become more economical vs. frontier labs

#184

Post by zdragnar »

jyounker wrote: post #182

The problem with outsourcing, as opposed to remote developers, is that it takes a really good manager and tech lead to make it work. My experience is that you have to write extremely detailed design documents and work specifications in order to get effective results. These generally have to be as detailed as most effective prompts. Once you've written specs that detailed, why do you need outsourced developers and fro…

Having worked at a place with few or no design documents, few or no specifications and a team that was at least half outsourced or more, I can say that was not an effective place to work.

Re: Outsourcing plus local AI will soon become more economical vs. frontier labs

#185

Post by CuriouslyC »

The future of American frontier AI isn't API calls, it's you taking your task to OAI/Anthropic like a consultant/external entity, then getting a product or whatever back, without ever seeing a large volume of intermediate work. This is inevitable because of the combination of distillation threat and proprietary harness development effort required to push performance at the bleeding edge.

OAI/Anthropic are 100% going to try to take everyone's jobs, and "own" labor. The Chinese are the good guys here.

Re: Outsourcing plus local AI will soon become more economical vs. frontier labs

#186

Post by blauditore »

ern_ave wrote: post #158
spprashant wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"offshore Indian devs" are no slouches. They have access to the same GPT models and likely cost a tenth of the median US salary. Businesses are always looking to lower marginal cost. They will hire 1 software architect in US to write specs and 10 software developers in India to babysit 100 agents.

> "offshore Indian devs" are no slouches. What evidence is there of the quality of Indian devs specifically? One signal I'd expect to see, for example, would be success in programming competitions. Here's the list of winners of the IOI competition [1] - India has won 3 times. Meanwhile, Turkey has won 4 times, Estonia has won 5 times, and Vietnam has won 22 times! Why should we suspect that there are more or better d…

Programming competitions are not the same as real-world engineering, plus these countries have way more people trying to use these competitions as a gateway to good jobs. Also, many good engineers emigrate to higher-income countries given the chance, and almost none will imigrate to low-income regions. The consequence is some sort of brain drain.

Re: Outsourcing plus local AI will soon become more economical vs. frontier labs

#188

Post by tomp »

jyounker wrote: post #182

The problem with outsourcing, as opposed to remote developers, is that it takes a really good manager and tech lead to make it work. My experience is that you have to write extremely detailed design documents and work specifications in order to get effective results. These generally have to be as detailed as most effective prompts. Once you've written specs that detailed, why do you need outsourced developers and fro…

The entire business model of "outsourced" developers / shops is to overbill people - "we have 4 engineers working on your project" (and also on 5 other projects).

Even if the engineers themselves are cooperative, their managers / business owners will resist close cooperation and enforce work at arm's length (e.g. 1x weekly calls).

Ask me how I know. I once spent £300k (fortunately not my money) on an outsourced team of developers, and they delivered nothing at the end. Most of the time it was simply about aligning the work! We (me and my partner, we together had some idea of what we actually wanted) tried repeatedly to make sync-s more frequent, to better align the efforts, but their managers kept resisting. It's the "consulting" business model!

For remote jobs, the incentives are reversed. You're literally a full-time employee, there's no management layers to impede communication, and (unless you're lazy or a fraud) you probably want to work on interesting problems and not be bored!

Re: Outsourcing plus local AI will soon become more economical vs. frontier labs

#190

Post by lurking_swe »

henry2023 wrote: post #85
ecshafer wrote: post #67

I have really been trying to get local models to work. I have tried different harnesses, tooling, skills, prompts, etc. But when I compare claude code with anthropic models or codex with gpt 5.5, vs qwen, glm or gemma and the same harnesses, the frontier models come out massively ahead. I am at the point where I just don't see the point of the non-frontier models, they waste more time than they save.

local models are 3 to 6 months behind SOTA models with the huge benefit of not needing to send all your IP to a shady third party. If inference cost comes down (as it has been for the last few years) you’ll be able to run today’s SOTA in your laptop by the end of the year.

the bigger issue is context windows. HUGE difference there.
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