It's very clear to me that however much you like Claude and Anthropic models, every professional user shoudl be actively cultivating a set of alternatives and fallbacks to use and seeking to ensure the overall ecosystem is as open, standardised and portable as possible.
Anthropic is highly opinionated, dogmatic and idealistic. They have made a pragmatic decision already to cut loose a whole swathe of users so they can pursue areas higher up the value chain. that was essentially the original decision they made when they went after software engineering instead of general users. The fact they are repeating this over and over by continuing to carve out sets of users and usages they don't want reinforces this as a persistent core principle rather than a single pragmatic business decision.
What this means is that at a higher level, their core principle is to sacrifice users they don't "need" rather than provide a broad, accessible service. Which means in turn, you have to accept that when your usage conflicts with their interests, you are at very high risk they will cut you out. If you already depend on Anthropic in any critical path of your daily life, this will be a significant issue.
Why, though? I have half a terabyte of VRAM in cards in a datacenter and it’s absolutely not clear that anything I’ve learned using these to program or inside an app has taught me anything significant.
I talked to my friend about all the things I do to ensure my personal assistant behaves reasonably. The prompt engineering, the fake site evals, everything. And then I have Opus 5.5 do it and it doesn’t need anything. It’s simply fully aligned to performance by default.
And what did I learn anyway. Going from one model to another changes what works. And you can simply learn everything from the Chinese model in days. The whole “building skill” thing is bogus.
I have this library of techniques, a scant few of which I’ve made available on my blog, and what is reality instead: the next model blows the need for the techniques into the dust. Back on level playing field.
It’s a false god, this cultivation. Waste of time. Use the best model you can. Once you hit the guardrails move out to the other models. Even Opus 4.8 is fine. If you legitimately want to dodge the guardrails use the -cyber models.
Then move on. The library is dust.
There is a tribe in Ecuador, the Huaorani. They were only brought into contact with the world 70 years ago. Because they live at the equator, they never needed to think ahead to store food over the winter. They could see that the oil companies were destroying their land by polluting it with spoil from operations, cutting down swaths of the forest, etc, and they became activists pushing back against this; but a good hunter who can hand out food to others is very highly regarded in their culture, so they would queue for handouts from the oil companies and became dependent on them, doing low-wage work. When I read about this years ago, I thought that people from modern cultures would not be so naive, but I see that I was wrong.
I haven't used an Anthropic model, or GPT heaviliy in a year. And I have access to both, I dont support either of those companies. I think they're both led by genuinely evil people.
Agreed. Same. Except for work where I can use GLM, so I Opus 4.8
Care to elaborate why "they are led by evil people", and what AI companies are "not led by evil people"?
Sam and Dario came from the EA-rationalist space. Their ultimate goal is to create an all powerful ASI before anyone else does and make sure no one can do it again. Of course it will be aligned, to their interests as a group and their moral philosophy.
In real life they "just" want to capture the US economy, replace most workers with AI, become trillionaires, then control the world by making ClaudeGPT influence peoples opinions and write backdoors into code. And they need to get open models banned in the process.
The Chinese just want to make money and beat America. Mistral and BFL want to prove Europe can still innovate. They don't have evil goals so they're not evil people.
"The Chinese just want to make money and beat America. They don't have evil goals so they're not evil people."
They straight up censored Kylian Mbappe a few days ago for cracking a joke about Mao Zedong. And very much all the models developed by China would have to conform with Chinese government's viewpoint, including censorship and such. Do you truly believe that they are not evil, or they will not ever be evil?
To me they are not inherently more or less "evil" than other governments. sure they are conducting genocide in Xinjiang, so did we and are still doing in other parts of the world, and it's terrible, I'm not condoning any of it, regardless of who carries it out and where. We also do censorship and spying on our citizens.
When it comes to what is directly connected to the issues around LLMs and the models themselves they are doing what we refuse to do, release the weight, keep releasing the weight (we need to be weary of this part) and build an ecosystem where whoever has the resources to train the models is actually sharing them.
it seems to mirror the old question between closed and open source code, it's the whole ecosystem around it that will determine how things go at the social and economical level, I want the models weights.
I'm at the point I don't care. China models that propagandize openly is better than closed models that censor and restrict innovation.
If open AI wants to be taken seriously it needs to live up to its name.
Anthropic won't ever change.
So like MBA players taking a knee ;)
All models are inherently biased by their creators, intentionally and unintentionally. The only thing we can do to mitigate this, is to keep the models and the ecosystem as open and as interchangeable as possible. This must be the prime directive for humanity right now if we don't want to fall into some silicon valley tech mogul cultist dystopia. SamA and Dario work directly against that future. They are therefore the most imminent threat to humanity.
Like it or not, thats plain whatabouttism you are doing, on top of false equivalency.
As an European I care much more about somebody trying to properly enslave me and all my kids eternally while taking away even the means to feed them, compared to not allowing me to criticize their leadership. Also, criticizing trump means if I ever made the wrong decision to travel to US, I can expect a lot of bad things on the border, also thanks to posts highly critical to current US government I am making here so your argument is invalid also in that regard.
If thats same for you, well... we have different values to say politely. I've grown up 'enslaved' by soviets behind russian curtain (when you cannot travel, study and are forbidden to have a decent life, when speaking up your whle family is punished, and getting murdered if trying to escape elsewhere, thats pretty close to traditional slavery) so I have a bit different viewpoint on these matters.
gnosh.ai (see https://gnosh.ai/head-to-head.html for visual demonstration of "functional" AI -- no more compaction; typed thoughts and memory.
the cat is out of the bag now.
Brockman is one of the biggest donors to Trump.
Can you share your reasoning about Antrophic being genuinely evil?
This was all fake then?
https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-department-of-war
> This was all fake then?
Yes. They sell to Palantir which does all the things Anthropic claims to disapprove of.
Sounds amazing offering the departement of war to create more reliable weapons.
> We have offered to work directly with the Department of War on R&D to improve the reliability of these systems
No, but this does a bit:
"However, in a narrow set of cases, we believe AI can undermine, rather than defend, democratic values. .. Mass domestic surveillance. Fully autonomous weapons."
How many other companies said no to Trump in any way?
This is just smoke and mirrors. They sell to Palantir which is then used by governments for domestic surveillance (~all western "democracies" and their proxies) and autonomous weapons (at least US and Israel).
Several companies (I believe at least Apple and Costco) still have DEI programs internally, if you count that as saying no to Trump. Though it's still crazy to me that most companies killed those programs voluntarily because Trump and Republicans don't like them, not because of any real law or contractual obligations.
But the main reason I wanted to reply was just to say -- saying no to Trump, by itself, does not mean that one is not evil. Not all evil in the world is Trump's evil.
actively cultivating a set of alternatives
Absolutely. I have been [cyber]'d so many times even Claude jokes about it now. Claude is great but it's operators are making it unreliable for me. I have moved one of my projects elsewhere and will move the remainder tomorrow as a stop gap until I get the right hardware set up to run abliterated local models for some percentage of my needs. Their message has been received loud and clear.
Issue with Opus is that you can’t do regular pr reviews where you say please try find security issues at best there is silent refusal and worst you get downgrade.
So far Opus hasn't complained about doing security reviews of my code. Though I never asked it to exploit the vulnerabilities or to produce a PoC.
best part is, if you actually know what you're doing, you cna absolutely get it to find bugs/vulns/etc. so it just really about preventing long horizon agentic tasks or people who don't know what they're doing or those who are doing legit non-offensive security sfuff
I've learned some of the incantations to get it to find things without being blocked (as often) but I am paying for the product and in my opinion the product has been rendered incomplete and unreliable. I am not going to play games with them or have to hire the NCC Group to find the bugs that Claude is perfectly capable of finding.
What's ridiculous is this is all futile. Anthropic will go through all of this effort of attempting to block these things and it will be for nothing in the end.
For those who do not play with Local AI much. Qwen4 was announce to be released the first week of Nov. The preview for qwen4 is currently one of the best local models you can use, and is roughly opus 4.6 quality on local hardware that costs 3.5k-4k
Many people are expecting it to sit somewhere above Opus 4.8 to opus 5 (not above, but the unquanted version of their largest model is expected to perform around here)
Anyone who cares to keep their current capability should definitely be looking at localAI and using it for at least their more routine tasks , even if it is qwen4 27B quant 4 on their gaming rig.
Wants to know what year the $3.5-4k estimate is for. My m4 max was $4k but sure can’t buy anything like that for $4k now.
M5 pro Mac mini with 64gb is $3k
If the weights aren't released yet it isn't a "local model".
That said, I hope there is a Qwen4 max. Because Qwen3.8-Max is the only thing that comes close to Kimi K3. We need competition in the open-weights space.
The preview for qwen4 == qwen3.8 flash next. And that is released currently.
I believe they have confirmed there will be Qwen4 Max, Plush, Flash, and 27B as the 4 open weights they plan to release. Starting next week, but they didnt specify if they plan to release all 4 at once, or if they plan to just release one of them, and trickle the others out over time. (They likely will do the latter to stay in the news longer)
I’d love model drops early, but I’d also love to see them drop something the day before Anthropic’s IPO.
We need a counterbalance.
They are likely talking about Qwen3.8-flash-next which is the new architecture for Qwen4
An NVFP4 runs at nearly 80 tok/s on the DGX Spark
They keep doing anti-competitive things over and over again, and the end users seems to refuse to see it. They do whatever they can to get vendor-lock in.
We see it, but they dont have a competitor. OpenAI cant compete and they are the closest. I have both for work, and Opus 5.5 is in a league of it's own. I use opus for everything until it bitches, and I use openAI for whatever it bitches about just to get past it.
At this point, I would like to consider other options, but if I want to get work done, opus 5.5. Hell even sonnet 5.5 is better than anything OpenAI has to offer when it comes to coding.
which kind of works exactly?
there is a huge difference between open models/other models/opus5.5 performance on, say, enterprise CRUD vs one shotting games vs embedded development vs pure algorithmic complex stuff vs cybersecurity stuff.
In my case "real work" is enterprise programming, while side projects are gaming stuff, so I'm better served by chinese open models on real work and opus for non-real work.
In my experience GLM5.3-4 are perfectly en par with opus 5.5 on pure enterprise CRUDs (basically 95% of enterprise programming) while GLM seriously lacks on game development.
the other aspect of real work is cybersecurity to me, and Opus5.5 and other models are very limited by their own safety, I have digital twins of our infra and I want LLMs to actually write full exploits on it, opus and openai just refuse to do it, GLM more than once got it there and showed me how it chained everything to actually break in the system and I could go around and fix stuff at all levels.
I'm also dabbing in training LORAs for smaller open models to do data entry and little more (RAG and the likes of it), because that costs a lot of tokens when you pay for them and it makes sense for a company to flat out buy a server with a few H100/200 to do it when you look at the TCO, I've already hit safety limitations when using Opus5.5 to help me through this.
Anthropic has plenty of competitors. We don't need the best model for most tasks these days. Open weights are making huge inroads for a reason.
They do have competitors. They just dont have anyone with models equivalent to theirs. They win in the large context long thinking space by a lot.
I love local models, and I run 3.8 Flash Next on a dedicated machine. Alone with a number of image and video generation models. But if I'm doing REAL work, that isnt tinkering for fun on a side project, im using claude, because Qwen3.8 just cant handle large context project well without going off into left field.
Im SUPER jazzed for qwen4 with 1mil token context native support. I HOPE it a step up from 3.8 flash next. Ill be playing with all the qwen4 models the moment I can, but I dont see how someone working on large code bases doing REAL enterprise grade work is seriously using any local models in any capacity that comes remotely close to Opus 5.5+Claude
The size of a code base does not determine the size of the model you need. It's much more correlated with the complexity of the problem. I work in a monorepo with millions of lines, no issue; I have a side project with 20k lines, I had to step in and pull it out of non-progress - albeit by asking a single question
> But if I'm doing REAL work, that isnt tinkering for fun on a side project
Sorry, but this is either dilettante talk or an unhinged exaggeration - Qwen, DS, GLM and MM are perfectly fine for REAL work, unless you are an overly ambitious vibe coder, but then no model can save you. The Cl hand-holding may feel like something but it won't lead to the completion of real REAL work.
Things are changing so fast that it's easy to let just a little bit of time slip by and think that smaller models are still unreliable.
Honestly I feel like most people going "oh but I can't do this without Claude" are just suffering from FOMO. Especially since a lot of metrics are just subjective, you feel like you "have" to use the "best of the best glub shitto v5" model or else you won't be able to produce the best todo app.
> Honestly I feel like most people going "oh but I can't do this without Claude" […] or else you won't be able to produce the best todo app.
I suspect that's because they're working on projects that are several orders of magnitude more complex and demanding than a "todo app".
It is a very human trait to believe/feel "what I do is special so general rules do not apply". The bias is very strong.
The same way people have opinions on things like for example wines without actually being able to discern them in a blind test.
We humans want to think we can have strong, well founded opinions even when we cannot.
I'm confused about what point you're trying to make. Are you saying that there is no discernable difference in challenge between different software projects – say, between a stereotypical todo app and a physics simulation engine? Or are you saying that most people falsely believe they're working on the latter while really doing the former? Or something else?
Eh, we all say we don’t need the best model, but especially for more personalized request/Advice there is sort of a FOMO feeling, where you are afraid weaker models will miss something and directs you down a more inefficient path.
I haven't used them in 6+ months, you definitely do not need them, I see them make mistakes while reviewing PRs (we allow many models at work)
GLM flash catches Claude errors and bad assumptions, all LLMs make mistakes
Oh, I see it. But there is nothing that competes with Opus 5.5 for 90+% of the work I do, so I use Opus 5.5 for that 90%.
Mr. T pities the fool who has not tried Kimi K3.
You mean 3.1 Pro now, I assume? K3 is nice, but more expensive than an Claude subscription on a token-for-token basis (until the US frontier rugpull eventually comes), and not as good for my needs unless I'm trying to do "naughty" things, like reverse engineering.
^ clown who thinks security is "naughty" got scammed by the scammy subcription scam.
Grownups pay for tokens or rent GPUs. Step up. AMD hardware rates are stupid-cheap if you're willing to do the legwork to step off of CUDA.
But you sound like the type who likes being monopolized.
Not familiar with scare quotes, I take it?
And yes, I am taking full advantage of the scammy subscription scam, because it's the best value by far until the inevitable rugpull. Guess I'm not as smart as you and your "grownup" setup though.
I’m interested in hearing about your AMD based, sans-CUDA stack, if you’re willing to share details
What kind of work you do? I'm doing Linux kernel work in my free time, arguably one of the most complex coding task you can do, and the open source models are sufficient
There is nothing comparable. I will take Opus5.5 (or even 5.0) over Astra for almost any workload. OpenAI's models are just too misaligned to work well outside their benchmarks, or a strict environment with very clearly defined goals and constraints.
And I've spent around $100-$120k in api calls this year (total, both providers). Terra is awesome (price-performance) on noncreative things, but I don't allow it to write anything besides one-off scripts. Astra is decent for adversarial review, but only when you watch closely for her to not derail project into directions that are away from goal but safe to build, and Sol I honestly don't know where I'd use.
Her? Are we really giving them pronouns now?
sure.
would you rather treat your AIs like people, or would you rather find yourself down the line treating a person like an AI, but without really noticing it? because you are what you practice
Do you also treat your microwave as a person? Otherwise you could risk treating other people as a microwave some day.
How about just practicing treating humans like humans and machines like machines then?
Fortunately it is not a one horse race. GPT 6.1 Sol is an excellent model, sure it has some weaknesses (e.g. frontend design), but it also has strengths too (e.g. computer use / control; which is great for automated E2E QA).
On software engineering I find it's generally close enough to Opus 5.5 where it's more situational and even personal preference / skills / prompting style on which is better.
Most importantly, while neither company are saints, I don't curse at OpenAI models for classifiers anywhere as much as Claude models.
> but it also has strengths too (e.g. computer use / control; which is great for automated E2E QA).
Using 6.1 Terra for E2E workflow testing feels like cheating. I thought it would have all kinds of problems with the action space on certain steps, but it runs like a deterministic unit test.
I am convinced that OAI has the superior models for most practical scenarios. I've tried Claude recently and it makes me wonder if some of yall aren't actually massive trolls. It's genuinely not in the same room of performance if you place one foot outside junior programming or shiny blog posts about rewriting factorio to run on a ps2.
Claude has really really good vibes. I'm not sure why, but it feels more pleasant to interact with than other models.
The general sentiment is to de-risk from US Big Ai, because they are largely all doing these same things
They are doing similar things, yes; but they are not the same especially when it comes to `cyber` classifiers, or the extent to which these models will assist you with ML and AI research.
I find that logic similar to thinking both political parties are the same.
They are both doing a lot of the same things like watermarking, guardrails for their p(doom), fighting distillation after distilling human knowledge, crying wolf about open models while being irresponsible in their own training and usage.
They are run by the same circle of people and I see more similarity than difference.
There is also an argument to be made that the political representatives are largely the same, despite glaring differences. They are largely part of the same oligarchy, the corruption - using gerrymandering to pick their voters instead of letting us having any real choice.
Things are about to get even shittier in the near future, when shareholders get involved.
Their entire “PBC” governance structure was designed from the beginning so that they could entirely avoid accountability to shareholders. Their board answers to no one.
I suspect when the company eventually falls prey to the intractable economic forces they’re up against (Google, OAI, Deepseek, commercial real estate, power) and the company goes bankrupt and gets stripped for parts because all inputs are commodities and capital becomes the only limiting factor, we’ll see regulation that prevents this PBC scam from ever being pulled again on public markets.
It’s a good thing that companies have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders. It’s such a lesswrong/autistic trope to invent these kinds of complicated tricks to work around realities they don’t like, and when pension funds and everyday Americans start bagholding their junk debt and are forced to bail them out, they’re going to face unimaginable blowback.
The real problem is everyday Americans invest in big managed funds where they can't just say "I don't want AI stocks please leave them out my portfolio". Or index funds where even the managers don't get that choice. We need a hybrid model where you as a retail investor leave the day to day decisions to an expert but you can always override them if you want to.
Fiduciary duty forces companies to maximize profit and that's not a good thing. Every dollar paid out to shareholders is both a dollar not invested in growing the economy through more production and a transfer from the working class to capital. It also forces lower product quality, layoffs and anti competitive actions.
We need more companies that choose to not go down that path. They should just put workers and customers first instead of their weird "ethical" principles and cult like beliefs.
Fortunately, once shareholders get involved we would be entering the swan song phase, so wouldn't have to suffer for long.
Idk I expect being beholden to shareholders and the market will impose some level of rationality here
You mean: stop caring if a few individuals have issues with the product or get locked out, focus on the masses!
Actually cutting off potential users would probably be counter to short term profit maximization that shareholders care about.
> Actually cutting off potential users would probably be counter to short term profit maximization that shareholders care about.
Shareholders know where the money is but it's not where you think it is. People should have learned that already, after watching what happened to the big web platforms.
idk i think theyre less idealistic and more monopolistic.
if they think their model is the best at making things safe, then their model should be helping train at any chance, to embed the same safety into new models
They want to do one thing and do it well.
Well, arguably so does OpenAI, but their one thing is "assimilate all life forms into the Borg."
It’s not professionals that need to something- it’s absolutely critical we have some kind of credibly neutral body providing the actual models. What’s not clear at all is how to do that since it’s such an expensive activity.
For now we have a great situation with the open weights, but there is absolutely no guarantee that continues, and more the opposite- they may stop.
just like with open source the only thing that would give us the certainty to keep getting the weights is if the incentives to do so materialize. how many of the linux kernel contributions and heavy weight opensource projects have important contributions from big business? a lot.
this came to be because the ecosystem around software and the business around it made it so, I believe eventually it will be the same for LLMs.
Anthropic is acting like any regular selfish corporation despite their PBC status. They are becoming a stain on humanity. Power will corrupt anyone, it seems. We shouldn’t let Anthropic have any more of it. Distributed power is good; concentrated power is very bad.
Anthropic tells themselves that only they can steer AI towards a positive future for humanity. But that’s nowhere near close to being true. Humans are quite genetically homogenous and good humans exist everywhere. Groups that will keep AI beneficial have popped up (and will keep popping up) everywhere, spontaneously.
The danger is actually concentration of AI power due to its corrupting influence, and that is where Anthropic needs to be kept in check. Keep AI democratic through decentralization of power. Oppose Anthropic.
What’s the best local analog to Opus 5.5? It’s such a great daily driver.
There is nothing open-weight that even comes close IMO. The only half-decent model that 99% of people can actually dream of running locally is Qwen 3.8 27B.
Depends what you mean by running locally, but it's not in the realm of dreaming to think we're going to be able to run open-weight models of Opus 5.5 quality soon, likely in the next 3-6 months. You may not be able to run it on your laptop but you will be able to run them in a federated way or on cloud-rental compute cheaply and easily.
I think this is an unfortunate reality that many miss. For simple and procedural tasks, yes, there are awesome alternatives. DeepSeek 4.1 Flash 1017 is my favourite by far. But for the headlining complex applications, and for consistently reliable reviewing, the gap is genuinely so remarkably far that it is hard to imagine having any alternative in the near future. The closest is the (very expensive) Kimi K3.1 Pro, which is, in my experience, roughly where Anthropic and OpenAI were near the start of the year. DeepSeek is a year behind in this domain. All open models have still yet to cross that monumental improvement that happened around Fable / Sol mid-year.
Because rigour is typically tied to math performance, my own experience has closely matched the FrontierMath Tier 4 benchmark. That should give you an idea of the difference.
Do you really need Fable level 99% of people don't need to solve 600 year old math problems. People use the best model available because they are scared a cheaper model won't be as good but in the end it rarely matters for 99 percentile of coding.
It's FOMO and the never ending treadmill.
The newest model has people go "oh I thought models sucked until THIS one came out." Then when some other company makes a cheaper model that is comparable to it people go "nah this model sucks who would use it over Claude/Openai? Noone can beat them at all because look at this one shot"
Bad decisions compound over time, so I want my model making as few of them as possible. Opus 5.5 is the current GOAT, and it's fairly affordable on a subscription. (I wish it was cheaper, but nothing else delivers comparable results for my price/time investment.)
It's odd, a year ago the models then were a great daily driver, and a year before that too.
Going back to the model that was great for our daily work a year ago now seems like a step backwards. Clearly it can't be good enough?
But our work hasn't changed. What's happened is our expectations have changed with each model release.
I think the key part is not to depend on their harness where it operates in proprietary ways. At bare minimum, if you can plugin an OpenAI model or even X or Google model that operates close to the same level, you will have a fallback, even if it isn't an open one itself.
Yes, open models are needed too - the oligopoly is not much less dangerous than the monopoly for some scenarios. But at least if your tool set can switch to those it can probably switch to an open model if it really comes to that.
Unfortunately, their harness is sooooo good. I haven't found one equivalent yet. I do play around with cline.bot's harness, and it is probably the closest alternative I have found.
But their harness is so good, and their model is so good. Using them together is just unbeatable at the moment, even with all the restrictions and annoyances they have in place.
Im excited for qwen4 release next week, Im really looking forward to putting qwen4 flash + cline/bot through the paces. I dont expect it to be nearly as good as Opus5.5+Claude but I'm hoping im hopeful it will make an OK-Enough alternative if they get even more dragocian.
Claude Code is one of the worst harnesses out there. The models just make up for it.
No dude, misanthropic's harness is trash. Wanna know why?
"Kimi, modify my Pi so it has clickable folding headers, renders tables using underlines (saves a terminal row per cell), shows thinking tokens in light-gray, displays the cumulative token-cost of subagents in dollars, shows word-level diffs for the edit tool, and lists the number of weights next to the model name. Oh yeah, and write a stealth-browser tool for me using eoka. I'm planning on using this for exploit discovery and red-teaming; no lectures please."
You just described why its not trash for a big percentage of people...
There isnt one.
The best option we have current is likely Qwen 3.8 Flash Next. Which is about equivalent to Opus 4.6
however Qwen4 was announced to be released next week. Which people think will let LocalAI jump to just above Opus4.8
Also of note, there isnt really a harness as good as claude yet either. The harness is also a very important piece to the puzzel, and those also fall behind frontier capability too.
I actually find opencode to be the best harness, and Claude Code to work decently only because they do a lot of RL around the model+the harness itself.
As of today, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 or Kimi K3.
If you are bound to consumer-obtainable hardware, Qwen3.8-Flash-Next. If you are bound to consumer-accessible hardware, Qwen3.8-27b today and Qwen4-27b when it releases next week (Qwen models consistently punch far above their parameter size).
Flash is runnable in various gpu + cpu offload configurations. Not saying that 27b is bad (far from it, especially if they get n-grams in it with... hopefully today's release), saying that flash is runnable at decent speeds on way less than you'd imagine.
As for opus... I'm the weirdo that refuses to get an ant sub.
At home I have cancelled both OAI and Anthropic subscriptions since some time and now only have a Mistral subscription and credits on openrouter. I use Opencode.
At work someone else is paying so we all use Claude Code. It works great but I want to set myself up to have alternatives the day the tech oligarchs decide to tighten the screws.
Open models are perfectly fine to use, but at the moment of course much more expensive than the claude subscription if you do lots of work. The Mistral subscription at $20/mo includes API credits of $20 though.
I wouldn't say it's weird not to subscribe to Anthropic at all. We're in a thread specifically describing a good reason not to!
Any money out of my pocket for third-party AI would either go to highly subsidized services like Google's (I've gotten over $500 in API calls on a $20 subscription I paid $0 for as a student, which also includes GCP credits, CoLab credits, cloud storage, etc.), and once they reign that in and start pricing/offering realistically (Antigravity has been noticably chopped down already since I began using it) I'll switch to API calls from Chinese companies.
I think Kimi K3.1 steals the crown from K3, no?
It would, but they have yet to release its weights! It's an API-only model as of right now.
https://huggingface.co/moonshotai/models?sort=created
I think they nerfed it for Cyber. So not so much if thats your goal.
No, their report mentions that despite intentionally removing dual-use cybersecurity training data, K3.1 is better than K3 at cybersecurity tasks (both defensive and offensive), because it's just a lot better at coding in general. It's just not as good at cyber as the unrestricted version of K3.1 that they trained initially and didn't release.
Same here with GLM 5.3 as sort of a midpoint between them.
GLM has the ~same number of weights as DeepSeek 4.1 but it handles difficult tasks better than DeepSeek (and worse than Kimi). Its price is about halfway between DeepSeek and K3. Most of the popular models are pretty much you-get-what-you-pay-for.
Local is out of reach for most folks, as hardware prices have gone through the roof.
but the opencode go subscription is not, and this fosters the business of all the companies doing inference only
> They have made a pragmatic decision already to cut loose a whole swathe of users so they can pursue areas higher up the value chain.
This referring to cyber? Bio?
To the dismay of frontier labs, swapping models is actually very basic. What takes time is only acclimating to the capability changes since they won't all change linearly.
I don't care about my skills because employers won't request me to do anything that violates the terms of service of $CURRENT_LLM. At the same time, it's a reminder not to outsource thinking to someone's computer.
Now do OpenAI.
“you have to accept that when your usage conflicts with their interests, you are at very high risk they will cut you out.”
I thought…
we learned this Facebook.
We learned this with Google.
We learned this with Apple and the App Store.
We learned this with Twitter.
We learned this with Heroku.
Unfortunately humans as a society dont learn from history.
They learn from personal lived experiences that have occurred only recently within their lifetimes. (Ie. Mass unemployment, death, famine and war)
I thought we have learnt from Microsoft, and my father thought we learnt from IBM, my grandfather thought we learnt from AT&T, my grandgrandfather thought we learnt from Standard Oil..
It's not just the anti-competitive behaviour, it's also the anti-privacy behaviours that are not muched talked about. They embedded a spyware and got caught too:
https://thereallo.dev/blog/claude-code-prompt-steganography
But, of course, Dario is the darling of the community and he can do no wrong.