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Outsourcing plus local AI will soon become more economical vs. frontier labs

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Re: Outsourcing plus local AI will soon become more economical vs. frontier labs

#301

Post by jason_s »

try-working wrote: post #273
Chyzwar wrote: post #48

When discussing LLM pricing, people are missing the plot. The subscription token price is 10x-40x cheaper than API pricing. Your 90$ Claude subscriptions give you close to $1000 to $4000 in equivalent API token pricing. The second issue is that the quality of the model “operator” makes a massive difference in the outcomes. Highly skilled senior devs who know how to prompt and have high agency will outperform team peo…

DeepSeek and Xiaomi are so cheap there's no need to get a plan. Just use the API.

something something something China something something intellectual property something something....

Re: Outsourcing plus local AI will soon become more economical vs. frontier labs

#302

Post by WaylandYang »

ecshafer wrote: post #67

I have really been trying to get local models to work. I have tried different harnesses, tooling, skills, prompts, etc. But when I compare claude code with anthropic models or codex with gpt 5.5, vs qwen, glm or gemma and the same harnesses, the frontier models come out massively ahead. I am at the point where I just don't see the point of the non-frontier models, they waste more time than they save.

[flagged]

Re: Outsourcing plus local AI will soon become more economical vs. frontier labs

#303

Post by leonidasv »

We shouldn't take free open models for granted. They're a byproduct of the current AI craze, but the economics aren't on their side. It's not sustainable. Alibaba already stopped releasing the weights for their best models, for instance.

Re: Outsourcing plus local AI will soon become more economical vs. frontier labs

#304

Post by FireCrack »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #124
kelseyfrog wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The quality of the model “operator” makes a massive difference in the outcomes. My hunch is that this is the source of much of the variability in outcomes upstream of HN commenters claiming extremes of, "This model changes everything!" to "This[same] model is crap." We haven't operationalized what it means to "be good at prompting," nor developed proxies/heuristics/shibboleths for accessing prompting skill. There's…

It's 100% this. Many people suck at prompting. It's likely that habits from search are ingrained. But in general some people are just so bad at it .

IDK if it's just me, but I also find Claude, whether it be the model or the harness, is a lot more "forgiving" of poor prompts than many of the open models

Re: Outsourcing plus local AI will soon become more economical vs. frontier labs

#305

Post by leonidasv »

logicchains wrote: post #141
zuzululu wrote: post #133

I keep seeing this narrative involving Deepseek as an example of OSS LLMs but they are subsidizing a huge amount of tokens at cost and one can easily understand why they are doing it if one is not lazy and think critically. It's still far too costly and not effective to use Local AI that can match what the frontier models can offer, especially when the inference hardware is being heavily restricted due to geopolitica…

>they are subsidizing a huge amount of tokens at cost This is absolutely false, because other providers serving the Deepseek models on OpenRouter are also able to offer very low prices, and they don't have the money to subsidize anything.

Sure, but they didn't spend on training the model. If DeepSeek is providing the model for the same price as third parties, then it's probably still losing money when you account for the training.

Re: Outsourcing plus local AI will soon become more economical vs. frontier labs

#307

Post by noman-land »

jason_s wrote: post #301
try-working wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DeepSeek and Xiaomi are so cheap there's no need to get a plan. Just use the API.

something something something China something something intellectual property something something....

You can just say the words instead of implying their meaning and letting everyone fill in the gaps themselves.

Re: Outsourcing plus local AI will soon become more economical vs. frontier labs

#308

Post by joegibbs »

Why would you ever offshore again now that we have LLMs? Offshored work was famous for its terrible quality and high prices, you'd just have to go back on everything, sit in a ton of useless meetings, make sure that you had very, very detailed design documents with every little piece accounted for.

Now you can put those detailed documents into the LLM and get a better result back in a couple of hours rather than weeks for a tenth or hundredth of the cost.

And the offshore devs are going to be using the LLMs themselves, why add another layer, level of bureaucracy, language barrier in between your requirements and the result?

Re: Outsourcing plus local AI will soon become more economical vs. frontier labs

#309

Post by UltraSane »

gpugreg wrote: post #102
stymaar wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lastly, there is a massive difference in capabilities, determinism, and error handling between 5T SOTA models like Opus What's your source for Opus being a 5T model? > and tiny distillations from DeepSeek that perform well only in benchmarks. I don't think you know what you're talking about. Local models aren't “distillations from Deepseek”. And they don't perform well “only in benchmarks”, Qwen 3.6 is a very decen…

> What's your source for Opus being a 5T model? Elon Musk tweeted that Grok is 0.5T or 1/10th the size of Opus. https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/2042123561666855235#m While this source's reliability is certainly debatable, the size matches the results of this paper, in which researchers estimated the parameter count from model knowledge. https://01.me/research/ikp/

Elon Musk has absolutely no credibility anymore. I'm more likely to believe the opposite of what he claims to be true.

Re: Outsourcing plus local AI will soon become more economical vs. frontier labs

#310

Post by UltraSane »

layer8 wrote: post #104
stymaar wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lastly, there is a massive difference in capabilities, determinism, and error handling between 5T SOTA models like Opus What's your source for Opus being a 5T model? > and tiny distillations from DeepSeek that perform well only in benchmarks. I don't think you know what you're talking about. Local models aren't “distillations from Deepseek”. And they don't perform well “only in benchmarks”, Qwen 3.6 is a very decen…

> What's your source for Opus being a 5T model? Probably Elon Musk: https://eu.36kr.com/en/p/3760679047267075

I don't know why stymaar's comment is flagged and dead, he is 100% correct.
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