141–150 of 300 posts
I use opensource models at work because my work is too cheap to spring for a $20/mo account for me. Since HuggingFace models can be run on my laptop now (still very slow though), nothing is leaving the 'secure environment' and so I can actually get work done (instead of the 'old' version of coding and writing - google).
I swear, Qwen 3.8 27B @ Q8 is smarter than Sonnet 5 most of the time. Why wouldn’t corporate America self host at this point, especially with better options like Deepseek Flash and GLM 5.3 flash that’s a middle ground between Sonnet and Opus
Agreed. And conversely, American models can also just as easily be secretly influenced for bad things, or be more tightly controlled by the government, to corporate America's own detriment.
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But most commodities are the same way. It’s super expensive to drill for oil. I need oil and I’m in no position to mine my own because of the massive capital investment. But it doesn’t stop it from being a pure commodity. I couldn’t care less which company drilled for the oil… it’s all the same to me. Models are increasingly no different. OpenAI and Anthropic are a gas station saying “buy our gas for 10x the price!”…
I argue there's no difference. At least OpenAI/Anthropic can be considered premium like Octane 93 while OSS ones are 87. I agree 90% of the world can work with 87 gas, but there's always niche/luxury market where 93 can make small difference. (edit: typo)
The crazy setup here is that even with that fraction of the pie these companies might be worth say $100 billion optimistically, which would be amazing in normal times. Problem is it’s a train wreck for their investors and the associated debt bubble if they can’t sustain a valuation of 1-2 trillion and the present setup does not put them on a course to that trajectory.
Every larger company I talk to these days has an active project on moving away from OpenAI and Anthropic to open models. And they’re actively shifting, as the article says, so the threat is far from theoretical. Unless they both dramatically slash prices then they’re in big trouble. Neither of them can afford to do that and both desperately need to convince the street that the opposite will happen if they want any ho…
This is exactly true, I get annoyed by Claude one day and switch to something else, and the only thing that's ever keeping me tied towards Claude is the ability to search my old chats easily. But Claude also makes it really hard to do that, so what am I even really paying for? Time to extract all my data, put it into a sqlite with FTS5 and make sure I never rely on the overly-opinionated, low-thinking PMs from these…
I’d try:
1 exporting my data (I imagine it’s common outside of GDPR?)
2 asking Claude to convert it to an easily digestible format :)
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Agreed. And conversely, American models can also just as easily be secretly influenced for bad things, or be more tightly controlled by the government, to corporate America's own detriment.
America's own demise will be made in America, stamped by American laws
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Yes, but changing models, even across providers, takes about two seconds and one line of code. It’s literally the least stickiest thing in the history of tech. Which is a big problem for these companies.
The API switch takes one line of code. The enterprise switch takes one line of code and twelve departments.
I'd love to! For real coding though, SOTA models barely get the job done. It wasn't until Opus 4.5 that you could really get decent results. I'm sure this will change (and I can't wait for it!) but as of today, open models might be fine for summarizing and writing docs, but you need SOTA to work on code if you want to be competitive.
You're not corporate America (and trust me, I mostly mean that as a plus). I also work in software, and while I vaguely disagree that open models can't be used (they absolutely fit into productive niches here, and holy hell are the last generation [ex laguna s1, kimi k3, glm 5.3, etc] actually decent) - I will agree that SOTA are a better fit for software development, especially when used in conjunction with an alrea…
Seems like if you ask 5 different people what "real coding" means you might get 5 different answers.
Not everyone is building the next framework or compiler.
Self-hosted Qwen 3.8 @Q4 on my RTX 3090 can produce beautiful functional CRUD pages and apps all day long. And that is 90% of the "real coding" being done in corporate settings.
The quote in the article about Mazda vs. Maserati captures this. Many might want the Maserati and drool over its specs and capabilities, but balk at the cost and how often are they really going to run it up to full performance limits on their daily commute to their cubicle?
Just use Fable 5.1/Opus max for the hardest problems, GPT Sol high as your workhorse, and maybe terra for async batch stuff you don't really care about. Gemini 3.8 High also looks pretty good and is quite fast if you're already a GCP shop. You can basically benefit from open models without using them because they force the frontier models to be cheaper.
My hot take is that open models don't really save you money and introduce more router complexity and security risk (because you're now sending your company data through more less trustworthy providers). Look at cost per task not cost per token and the pareto curve is largely owned by closed models. Just use Fable 5.1/Opus max for the hardest problems, GPT Sol high as your workhorse, and maybe terra for async batch st…
Coding, maybe.
But for operationalized/repeatable tasks it definitely does.
For example I have a workflow that I was running in April that effectively would cost $30k in token spend for each full run.
However now, with GLM 5.3-flash, we've brought the cost down to $7k-9k with our evals showing we've had no loss in recall, precision etc..
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I support and use open models as much as possible, but I'm not totally convinced that OAI or Anthropic have no moat, even as open models catch up to the frontier. Serving and inference are still hard problems when you're talking about a 2 trillion parameter model. Fine-tuning, if that remains a realistic need for businesses, is also a difficult infra problem at that scale. In the most bearish case, where there is no…
Also people are people and they will get emotionally attached to claude :)