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There is minimal downside to switching to open models

marble.onl

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Re: There is minimal downside to switching to open models

#11

Post by kgeist »

julianlam wrote: post #6

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…

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.

Re: There is minimal downside to switching to open models

#12

Post by aussieguy1234 »

>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.

Re: There is minimal downside to switching to open models

#14

Post by 4fffs »

kgeist wrote: post #11
julianlam wrote: post #6

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…

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.

Correct. Anything else is pure marketing and you have fallen for it.

Re: There is minimal downside to switching to open models

#15

Post by 4fffs »

mdale wrote: post #7

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…

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.

Re: There is minimal downside to switching to open models

#17

Post by dwoosley »

julianlam wrote: post #6

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…

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.

Re: There is minimal downside to switching to open models

#19

Post by byzantinegene »

mdale wrote: post #7

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…

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.

Re: There is minimal downside to switching to open models

#20

Post by Gigachad »

julianlam wrote: post #6

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…

The reason for me is work pays for Github Copilot which doesn't have these open modals.
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