Massively subsidized. As soon as my Claude switches from subscription to overage I have to tap out quickly.
This is a big part of the reason I went local-only. Subscription limits are horrible for having a decent workflow.
There's no universe in which just buying a second or a larger subscription isn't a billion times better and cheaper than any kind of comparable local workflow.
Privacy, experimenting with ML and "unorthodox" needs are currently the only acceptable reasons to do local.
This sure looks like a race to the bottom to me, and I love it. If Sol isn't the best model, it is up there... You don't cut the price of the best model for no reason...
> This sure looks like a race to the bottom Always has been. My prediction is that both OpenAI and Claude will go bust unless they deliver a killer product. And unlike scrappy startups, they have a pretty serious deadline because creditors will come a-knockin'. There's little to no functional difference between Kimi, Qwen, Sol, Opus, etc. All flagship models are within like 1-5% of each other and the real moat will b…
Have you found an alternative to codex / Claude code? I’ve tried opencode but it’s been buggier / feels like an inferior product to both.
After using Claude for a long time, I tested Sol 5.6 for the first time today. Love it, its an incredibly capable model and uses far fewer tokens/time thinking. Its what I imagine Fable would be if I haven't been downgraded on every conversation - even after completing the verification program. I think I may cancel my Claude subscription finally.
Sol is way too eager to hone in on small details and ends up with massive over-engineering. Fable does it too - to be fair - but noticeably less. After extensively using both on Max 20x plans, I've concluded that Fable is better for problem solving and coding, whereas Sol 5.6 Ultra shines in debugging specific issues: tackle a problem with Fable then leverage Sol to clean up, double check, or fix specific issues. Fab…
I get a lot of mileage using Fable to spec, then Sol to review the spec, then Fable to plan, then Sol to review the plan, then Fable to implement, then Sol to review the implementation. It's a lot of steps, but a great boost in quality of output.
No, almost everyone has been in agreement that they’re subsidizing subscriptions, but there have literally been dozens (hundreds?) of threads on HN in the past 12 months with people vehemently arguing that API prices are subsidized.
I think both can be true - they're losing money on the API and they're still charging too much. Which is really where the music stops for American AI investment. I also use K3 now and its perfectly capable for the development work I'm doing. I don't shed any tears for OpenAI or Anthropic.
API are not subsidized. We know this is true from the existence of independent inference providers (a lot of which are crypto companies that would otherwise just be mining if inference weren't actually profitable).
I used over a billion tokens per day of gpt-5.6 sol xhigh starting last Wednesday through Sunday before reaching my reset limit. The $200 pro plan is still the best deal.
A billion tokens per day?? Plausible estimates put the energy use at about 0.001 Wh/token, which means you're using 1000 kWh/day in electricity, just to generate slop. That's about the same as 50-100 houses. 300kg of CO2 per day - roughly the same as flying from London to New York every three days . I think on average AI energy usage is not as big a deal as everyone is panicking about, but your usage is truly absurd…
Where do those estimates of 0.001 Wh/token come from?
I think both can be true - they're losing money on the API and they're still charging too much. Which is really where the music stops for American AI investment. I also use K3 now and its perfectly capable for the development work I'm doing. I don't shed any tears for OpenAI or Anthropic.
API are not subsidized. We know this is true from the existence of independent inference providers (a lot of which are crypto companies that would otherwise just be mining if inference weren't actually profitable).
Those providers are VC-funded, they don’t have the leeway to pivot away from AI. I would be interested in some examples though.
I think Fable's dominance is overstated. It definitely has the lead, but quantifying what that lead actually is is really hard. I'm using GPT 5.6 Sol to do some shit that I personally would consider "crazy" - low level undocumented hardware driver alchemy, reverse engineering highly obfuscated code, even a bit of screwing around with a rendering engine in Vulkan, really just about the most complex tasks I can get any…
I feel like those examples are considered difficult because they're niche topics, but aren't actually all that difficult in a general sense. What I consider truly difficult are things like taking a ticket and implementing it in a preexisting codebase, using a clean and reasonable design that fits the existing style and makes sense to a human, and avoids the footguns I learned by working with the codebase for over a d…
The competition is real in pricing. Thanks for the Chinese open models, US big players have to cut their inference pricing. We've done a bunch of evals between the models, and Kimi K3 was the first one that actually could compete or be even better than Opus or Sol in our use cases, with a fraction of the price. All our developers use K3 as their programming model, and it now powers a big part of our systems instead o…
I was struck by a video ad that Google released yesterday with testimonials by three developers about using Gemini 3.7 Flash [1]. The point they emphasize most is price, followed by latency. The marketing strategy definitely seems to be shifting. [1] https://youtu.be/kacf2bib-X0
You play to your outs. Gemini is far behind on quality.
> This sure looks like a race to the bottom Always has been. My prediction is that both OpenAI and Claude will go bust unless they deliver a killer product. And unlike scrappy startups, they have a pretty serious deadline because creditors will come a-knockin'. There's little to no functional difference between Kimi, Qwen, Sol, Opus, etc. All flagship models are within like 1-5% of each other and the real moat will b…
Compute is the moat. The Chinese models are cheap because no one is using them. But they can't actually afford (or have capacity) to serve enough people to kill the giants. This is evidenced by them all recently hiking prices or limiting usage. It's possible that they build out in China at an unreal pace, China doesn't have concept of "community input" to drag down state projects, but then you are left giving your IP…
Isn’t almost all of anthropic and OpenAI’s compute leased?
If compute is the moat, that doesn’t really make their position any less precarious.