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Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8, and Anthropic's (Potential) Unravelling

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Re: Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8, and Anthropic's (Potential) Unravelling

#21

Post by bwfan123 »

bko wrote: post #5

I think the risk is overstated. For one, on the margin people are willing to pay a lot for slightly better models. I know personally the value the LLM adds to my workflow is considerably more than the $200/m I pay the frontier labs. I have no interest in optimizing that to get it slightly lower. There are a very vocal minority that optimizes this or companies whose LLM expense is marginal, but I think that's the mino…

> There are open source alternatives that have >90% of the functionality, they'll even work w/ Excel files and generate them

Excel has network effects. If N people are using excel, the incremental N+1'th user is forced to use it or risk not being able to open documents from the N users. Excel is also sticky, in the sense that a user used to Excel UI is hesitant to switch to a new UI. Tokens dont have network effects. If N people use fable, the N+1'th user could use any other model, and have no impact.

Re: Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8, and Anthropic's (Potential) Unravelling

#22

Post by simianwords »

To everyone praising Open weight models, could you answer a simple question?

If Anthropic doesn't make money because of distillation attacks, how would they convince investors to invest in them, such that it makes financial sense for Anthropic to train even bigger models?

Assuming it is preferable for everyone that we get better models in the future. Distillation attacks remove the financial incentive.

Re: Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8, and Anthropic's (Potential) Unravelling

#23

Post by cmrdporcupine »

energy123 wrote: post #13
m_ke wrote: post #3

Anthropic will get squeezed by open models for 80% of the use cases that don't require frontier capabilities and by vertical specific labs for the high value tasks that would (bio, finance, math, etc.), where smaller use case specific models will beat them on cost and speed while matching or exceeding the performance of their largest general models. Even their hail mary of being first to "AGI" will never happen becau…

None of my use cases require frontier capabilities but I still pay $200/month to a frontier lab. I value the additional time saved at more than $200/month. If I had to pay actual API rates, then I'm not sure what I would do, but it would not be an easy decision.

Yes, the reckoning here will happen in a year or two when the (probably subsidized, maybe?) coding plans become either unavailable or much more costly.

It's also already the case that in larger companies people do not have access to these plans as employees and must use API rates.

There's also the political angle. When Anthropic and OpenAI held back their top of the line models because of Bessent & Trump's bullshit, and threatened to deny unwashed foreigners like me access... I dropped my Codex plan and made do purely with GLM 5.2 for three weeks before OpenAI finally released 5.6 Sol. Feels inevitable that this will happen again.

Or, somebody will come up with a way to serve e.g. Kimi K3 or the new Qwen model in an extremely cheap way. Or DeepSeek releases a competitive model at their cut-throat rates. And then the cost argument just wins.

Re: Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8, and Anthropic's (Potential) Unravelling

#24

Post by joshstrange »

I think the jury is still out on K3/Q3.8 and if they are equivalent to Opus or Fable. Benchmarks have gotten incredibly murky and I've tried models that are "the same as X model" and been unimpressed. I've tried other models with Claude Code and with tools like OpenCode or Pi and nothing has really come close to Claude Code using Anthropic's models (mostly Opus 4.8).

I'm not saying these other models are trash, just that I'm not quite ready to put them on equal footing to Anthropic or OpenAI models.

I think the future of LLM coding (and more) is probably routers that decide on a per-task basis which model to route to. Know when to use Fable/Opus and when to fall back to DeepSeek/Kimi/Qwen, even all the way to local models. Of course that's not in the frontier lab's interest but it feels like there is a lot of low-hanging fruit there. I hate that right now it's pretty much "just use the same model for planning/execution/etc" (without standing on your head).

Re: Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8, and Anthropic's (Potential) Unravelling

#25

Post by halfmatthalfcat »

overgard wrote: post #14

I keep thinking about the Figma thing. If you're unaware, here's the google summary: ---- The Board Departure: Mike Krieger, Anthropic’s CPO and a co-founder of Instagram, sat on Figma’s board of directors. He resigned on April 14, just days before news of Claude Design broke. This sparked speculation over conflict of interest and the use of proprietary product strategy information. Betrayal of Partnership: The launc…

This has been a story, age as old as time. How many times have startup founders been told "you're a feature" or "Google/Meta/etc can copy you so fast". Operators just need to stay vigilant of their value add, or they never really had a moat in the first place and were living on borrowed time anyway.

Re: Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8, and Anthropic's (Potential) Unravelling

#26

Post by palata »

behnamoh wrote: post #9

Nope, I'll still buy Claude because the overall XP is better than Kimi and Qwen who literally copied basic harnesses to make kimi-cli and qwen-cli, respectively. Also, you can tell if a model is genuinely powerful and well-thought-out vs a model that acts like it. It's like Apple vs Xiaomi/Huawei. Sure, you can get a Huawei with bells and whistles, but most people learnt the hard way that those companies just copy th…

> so might as well get the real deal.

Almost the same thing for twice the price, just for the pleasure of saying that you believe Apple was first?

Re: Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8, and Anthropic's (Potential) Unravelling

#27

Post by InsideOutSanta »

behnamoh wrote: post #9

Nope, I'll still buy Claude because the overall XP is better than Kimi and Qwen who literally copied basic harnesses to make kimi-cli and qwen-cli, respectively. Also, you can tell if a model is genuinely powerful and well-thought-out vs a model that acts like it. It's like Apple vs Xiaomi/Huawei. Sure, you can get a Huawei with bells and whistles, but most people learnt the hard way that those companies just copy th…

As somebody who bought an iPhone the day it became available and has been using iPhones for years, my favorite phone I've ever owned is my Huawei Mate XT Ultimate.

People keep pretending that Chinese companies only make second-class copies of American products until it's too late.

Re: Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8, and Anthropic's (Potential) Unravelling

#28

Post by jhonof »

bko wrote: post #5

I think the risk is overstated. For one, on the margin people are willing to pay a lot for slightly better models. I know personally the value the LLM adds to my workflow is considerably more than the $200/m I pay the frontier labs. I have no interest in optimizing that to get it slightly lower. There are a very vocal minority that optimizes this or companies whose LLM expense is marginal, but I think that's the mino…

> For one, on the margin people are willing to pay a lot for slightly better models. I know personally the value the LLM adds to my workflow is considerably more than the $200/m I pay the frontier labs. I have no interest in optimizing that to get it slightly lower. There are a very vocal minority that optimizes this or companies whose LLM expense is marginal, but I think that's the minority (correct me if I'm wrong, curious what their customer base looks like)

Enterprise is how Claude/OAI make their money. Enterprise companies absolutely optimize around costs for infra, it's like an entire job category.

> Also the actual LLM is a tiny portion of the value added. Anyone that tried to build agentic solutions from LLM apis quickly realizes that a huge value is the Claude Code / Codex harness. There are open source implementations like OpenCode but they're not nearly as good.

Claude and OAI are not valued at $1T because of their harnesses

> Think about it another way. Consider how much money Microsoft spends on maintaining Excel. There are open source alternatives that have >90% of the functionality, they'll even work w/ Excel files and generate them. Google sheets is probably 99% and available to everyone and better in a lot of regards. But the immense value spreadsheet software produces workers above the $100 or whatever a year makes it so that there is a real moat and no one bothers exploring alternatives.

Enterprise excel is like $50 a month, the closed source labs charge orders of magnitude more than that per user per month for enterprise, and want to charge more if they can to maintain their valuation. I spent $20 in an afternoon yesterday using my work plan for one workflow for reference, I probably spend at least $50 a day and I don't even do that much coding anymore.

Re: Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8, and Anthropic's (Potential) Unravelling

#30

Post by sieabahlpark »

overgard wrote: post #14

I keep thinking about the Figma thing. If you're unaware, here's the google summary: ---- The Board Departure: Mike Krieger, Anthropic’s CPO and a co-founder of Instagram, sat on Figma’s board of directors. He resigned on April 14, just days before news of Claude Design broke. This sparked speculation over conflict of interest and the use of proprietary product strategy information. Betrayal of Partnership: The launc…

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