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.