Other models arent even close except for gpt 5.5. You're dead wrong on that. You read too many benchmarks and/or chinese propaganda. There hasn't been a serious contender in agentic SWE besides OAI and anthropic for a long time, and no chinese model has even reached opus 4.5 performance yet. The moat isnt insurmountable but it is very solid for at least a 12 month lead time. Which is such an insane amount of time in this landscape and industry. The moat is stretching, not shrinking, on agentic SWE. And that is literally the only moat that matters for RSI.
DeepSeek 4 Pro is performing agentic SWE tasks for me quite well. It can't do everything Opus can do, but if OpenAI and Anthropic disappeared tomorrow, I'd figure out ways to make it work with harness improvements and other optimizations.
Anthropic can stretch the moat all they want, but in the department of trust, they put a final nail in their coffin today. Anthropic is pure evil at this point.
'evil' lol. Every single corporation you deal with is evil then. it's greed. and almost every large model provider is guilty of it. China is all open source right now. cool! gee i wonder what would happen if they ever actually achieved SOTA? They would clamp down on that so fast Dadio's dradel would spin
China isnt "all open source" they still keep their top models out of the public view. Its easy to "open source" models when they're so far behind very few will pay for them.
Open source in quotes because they are not open source and not even close to open source.
Can't we stop using "open-source" when it is just freeware?
Open-weight is both meaningful and unique term.
> Every single corporation you deal with is evil then.
I don't know. If my ISP started MITMing my traffic so that they could silently rewrite packets, and/or deleting files on my computer because they thought me sharing wireless AP with my SO was me trying to compete with them, I'd call them evil.
I believe they tried something similar to the first one a few years ago in the US, and I remember people called that evil to the point where tech giants shut down their websites in protest.
> gee i wonder what would happen if they ever actually achieved SOTA? They would clamp down on that so fast Dadio's dradel would spin
Cool. Let them "achieve SOTA" and close down the models. Let the pendulum swing the other way.
You seem to not understand what China's goal is here. They want the AI bubble to burst and take your 401ks with it. And OAI/ANTs decisions are driving you towards that cliff.
I use gpt 5.5 at work (because they pay for it) and DeepSeek at home (because I pay for it) and while I do agree one is better than the other, I think you’re really overstating how far apart they are. Just my take.
All models from the past two years are close in the general case.
This is just another incremental improvement, rushed out to boost the ipo, AI has the capacity to aid an engineer but this minor bump in performance will have essentially zero impact on the productivity of an engineer working on real world solutions when compared with any other major model.
We are trending towards asymtotic and it can't happen fast enough, that's when the true cost of this will become evident.
Honest question, is it possible that since might be using the latest/best model to analyze and improve the existing ones, the moat will expand exponentially, making the models better and more efficient at each iteration until there is no point in competing?
What's 12 months lead time worth? Not much from what I can tell. Contrary to what these AI companies might tell you, if an AI model can't do it, a human can still do the work.
Most of HN is stuck in this fantasyland where they insist their local LLM setup is comparable to Opus 4.8 or GPT 5.5. It's like a collective delusion, I've never seen anything like it.
You can get really good results with Chinese models. You're putting Opus and GPT on too high of a pedestal.
I use Chinese models (for simple personal projects), they just don't compare to GPT or Opus for any serious work.
I do not know why every Chinese model fan thinks that people that aren't impressed by them simply don't use them.
Wast majority of software engineers do very little except of moving JSONs around and building CRUDs.
It's quite obvious that when you dont try to do something particularly complex there will be literally no difference between GPT, Claude, Gemini and Deepseek.
Fot many things I'm doing in gamedev Gemini 2.5 Pro was already good enough even though it released more than year ago.
Once you pass certain threshold it's just enough.
Some of the new and open models are very capable now, The truth is, the value of the model is in the mind of the user - the big names are impressive to those who know little and are dazed by little, but they are bound to end up wrong regardless of how good the model is.
This is ridiculous. How about the rational users who use the best current model regardless of brand? The value of the model is in the quality of the output over time. I give every major model a chance. Coding and scripts in the chat are nothing compared to the power of agentic SWEEEEEEEEE. And nothing is remotely close to claude and gpt. If you're comfortable with being well behind SOTA intelligence, then good for you, but some of us prefer to be efficient with our time and resources. With your mindset, you will never truly SWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE