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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

#111

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

pkulak wrote: post #28

Sure. But OpenAI is the same price. Why would I pay $18/month for z.ai when OpenAI is $20/month?

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/...)

Re: There is minimal downside to switching to open models

#112

Post by cpursley »

lmm wrote: post #107
cpursley wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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Re: There is minimal downside to switching to open models

#113

Post by cpursley »

Latty wrote: post #109
cpursley wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They literally arrested people for quoting Charlie Kirk in tweets after his death.

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Re: There is minimal downside to switching to open models

#114

Post by fsuts »

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.

Agreed

Re: There is minimal downside to switching to open models

#115

Post by arttaboi »

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.

Re: There is minimal downside to switching to open models

#116

Post by PeterStuer »

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.

Re: There is minimal downside to switching to open models

#117

Post by hdgvhicv »

earthnail wrote: post #90
throwaway27448 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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."

Re: There is minimal downside to switching to open models

#118

Post by fsuts »

brucehoult wrote: post #38
marcus_holmes wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Re: There is minimal downside to switching to open models

#119

Post by leptons »

lmm wrote: post #107
cpursley wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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...

Re: There is minimal downside to switching to open models

#120

Post by lmm »

cpursley wrote: post #112
lmm wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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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)
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