Open-weight AI is having its Kubernetes moment • Hacker News Board

Re: Open-weight AI is having its Kubernetes moment

#51

Post by eulers_secret » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 5:45 PM UTC

thih9 wrote: post #16

Is anyone using open weight models for agentic coding? What is your stack (harness, model) and how much do you pay per month? How would you compare your experience to a typical subsidized plan like Claude Code + Pro plan? I’m asking because i keep hearing that open weight models are cheap and efficient - is that really the case in practice?

I use opencode or pi harness with the deepseek api for all my at home coding usages.

Deepseek is at least on par with Sonnet (ghcopilot at work)- I don’t use opus, too spendy and I don’t need that level of ability.

The cost is for me was $5/6 months of use. Not a big user I guess! It’s good though, fast enough and incredibly inexpensive.

Been testing Qwen 3.6 28B on a 5090, and it’s also quite good for “free”.

I mostly do small self serving embedded projects based on esp32, so not very complex.

Re: Open-weight AI is having its Kubernetes moment

#52

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 5:45 PM UTC

amazingamazing wrote: post #44

Sadly until china scales production of hardware it really isn’t economical to run this stuff yourself. It is good it exists though to put pressure against the labs. Honestly imo this is just proof apple will win in the end. Eventually a phone will be able to run a model good enough to do most things and it then is game over.

[deleted]

Re: Open-weight AI is having its Kubernetes moment

#53

Post by andsoitis » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 5:45 PM UTC

ncallaway wrote: post #38

gwbrooks wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure pricing to recoup costs is artificial.

The government backed monopoly to ensure that supply remains artificially restricted to ensure that the market will support the higher prices is

Drug companies have a portfolio of compounds they research. Most don’t pay off, so R&D costs make their way into the pricing of those superstar and other drugs that do work. Also, timelines are pretty long.

Re: Open-weight AI is having its Kubernetes moment

#54

Post by Syntaf » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 5:46 PM UTC

honkycat wrote: post #20

netdur wrote: post #10

why would any software want to have Kubernetes moment? can't count how devop I know that is confused by it

Recently my company bought another company, and we kept zero of the original engineers, we just had to run the ghost ship. We walked in, and it was fine. Because it was all kubernetes and laid out like every other app for the most part. The kube hate is just sad at this point. You need to know like 15 concepts that are all applied in the same way. It mostly just works.

It’s the pineapple on pizza of ops, people just like to fit in sometimes.

I’ve been running my own personal k8s cluster on digital ocean for the last 5+ years now and it’s dead simple.

Takes me 30 minutes to create a new namespace a deploy an app, love the bonus of having complete flexibility on my stack too — PVC + SQLite ftw

Re: Open-weight AI is having its Kubernetes moment

#55

Post by root-parent » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 5:47 PM UTC

amazingamazing wrote: post #44

Sadly until china scales production of hardware it really isn’t economical to run this stuff yourself. It is good it exists though to put pressure against the labs. Honestly imo this is just proof apple will win in the end. Eventually a phone will be able to run a model good enough to do most things and it then is game over.

>> do most things and it then is game over.

For the Hyperscalers...and Oracle...cant wait for the day...

Re: Open-weight AI is having its Kubernetes moment

#56

Post by kalu » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 5:47 PM UTC

The sentiment in this article is nice. But open source software is a weak analogy for frontier models. Principally because software requires zero capital investment (actually zero) while frontier models demand billions. Open models can only survive in the long run if they can (eventually) generate significant cash flows or if they are paid for by governments. Now China essentially has a monopoly on open weight models. And so supporting open source models means either supporting long term economic capture by China or supporting Chinese government control of your intelligence. Both of these outcomes are unequivocally bad from an American perspective. If you live in the valley and benefit from the US venture ecosystem you should be highly skeptical of open weight models. Banning them may very well be the best course of action.

Re: Open-weight AI is having its Kubernetes moment

#57

Post by derektank » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 5:49 PM UTC

ncallaway wrote: post #38

gwbrooks wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure pricing to recoup costs is artificial.

The government backed monopoly to ensure that supply remains artificially restricted to ensure that the market will support the higher prices is

In that light, the entire market itself looks essentially artificial, given drug manufacturing couldn’t exist without government guaranteed property rights, which are themselves a kind of monopoly on use.

But yes, the reason brand name drugs are drugs are more expensive than generics is due to intellectual property, both the patent and the trademark.

Re: Open-weight AI is having its Kubernetes moment

#58

Post by noncoml » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 5:50 PM UTC

kalu wrote: post #56

The sentiment in this article is nice. But open source software is a weak analogy for frontier models. Principally because software requires zero capital investment (actually zero) while frontier models demand billions. Open models can only survive in the long run if they can (eventually) generate significant cash flows or if they are paid for by governments. Now China essentially has a monopoly on open weight models…

Open Source is free as in speech

Open Weights is free as in beer

Re: Open-weight AI is having its Kubernetes moment

#59

Post by eigenspace » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 5:53 PM UTC

ForHackernews wrote: post #49

eigenspace wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The weights themselves aren't stolen. The claim is that Chinese companies are using VPNs and proxies to buy massive amounts of Claude Pro and Codex subscription accounts, and then selling usage on those subscriptions as cheap white-label LLM API usage. While selling that LLM API usage, they then capture all the prompts, outputs, and intermediate thinking the LLM does, and then sell those logs to the companies making…

...good for them? We used to call that competition. Imagine making this argument with a straight face in any other industry: "The claim is that Japanese car companies are buying Ford vehicles, and then leasing them to American consumers at cut-rate prices. In return for the cheap cars, the customers are letting the Japanese observe their driving behavior, studying how they use their F-150 and then the Japanese car co…

I wasn't arguing against the practice, I was clarifying that the weights of these models are not being stolen, and explaining what these companies do to create their models.

Re: Open-weight AI is having its Kubernetes moment

#60

Post by JumpCrisscross » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 5:53 PM UTC

amazingamazing wrote: post #44

Sadly until china scales production of hardware it really isn’t economical to run this stuff yourself. It is good it exists though to put pressure against the labs. Honestly imo this is just proof apple will win in the end. Eventually a phone will be able to run a model good enough to do most things and it then is game over.

> it really isn’t economical to run this stuff yourself

Quantised models running overnight go most of the way for non-coding tasks.