alt Hacker NewsThis is where open source models are important.
The latest deepseek v4 pro model is 2-5x cheaper than Claude Sonnet 4.6. Cursor's Compose 2.5 that was just recently released is 6x cheaper than Sonnet.
The state of the art models are going to get better and more expensive and smaller models are going to get cheaper.
There will be a point where the intelligence of both the cheap and state of the art models are indistinguishable by humans like it is indistinguishable for me to understand the difference the difference between Terrance Tao and my university math professor.
I don't always need the smartest and most expensive models. I will need it every once in awhile and will gladly pay that price if I had to. What I do need is the model that will solve the current problem I have in a reasonable amount of time.
Replies
> The state of the art models are going to get better and more expensive and smaller models are going to get cheaper.
Why do you think this will be true?
Right now I see the major US labs betting on gaining an advantage from having way more compute, and I see Chinese labs competing with one another in a resource-scarce environment, so they place much more emphasis on compute-efficiency.
But the supply chains that feed into the massive data center growth in the US are strained; there are energy, memory, and logistical bottlenecks to name a few.
In the medium-long run, compute capacity will not grow exponentially forever. Somehow it has for decades, but there can be no infinite exponential growth, and that point may be when the planet really starts to cook itself.
Maybe the US labs will become more compute-constrained, and then have to compete on efficiency.
Or maybe things change fundamentally in some other way I'm not thinking of.
>The latest deepseek v4 pro model is 2-5x cheaper than Claude Sonnet 4.6. Cursor's Compose 2.5 that was just recently released is 6x cheaper than Sonnet.
It's ironic how in a thread about "AI subsidies" that people don't think free model releases from AI don't count as subsidies. Whatever AI winter that would cause AI companies to stop subsiding tokens, would probably cause other AI labs to stop doing free model releases. They might not be able to un-release the current crop of open models, but assuming proprietary model development still happens, they'll quickly go obsolete.
Deepseek V4 Flash is far cheaper still, and a better model to compare to Sonnet 4.6. I'm finding it a reliable workhorse.
sorry to nitpick (I totally agree with what ur saying btw, I run Ministral-3b on my hardware as my go-to bc I don't usually need the "smartest and most expensive models")
> This is where open source models are important
open-weights, the training data isn't public
oss models don't directly matter when multiple at-scale frontier API providers have to compete on price: they are limited in defensible margin
They do matter in that oss researchers enable faster cross-pollination of good inferencing efficiency improvements to help the big boys adapt ideas from the community
Long-term local ai may matter more, but imo not there until models + hw get way better (1-2 years?) . Reasoning grade quality at speed is still $$$: we need fast opus, not slow sonnet.
>The latest deepseek v4 pro model is 2-5x cheaper than Claude Sonnet 4.6. Cursor's Compose 2.5 that was just recently released is 6x cheaper than Sonnet.
The only way you're running Deepseek V4 with comparable quality/performance is through OpenRouter, at which point you're still susceptible to being price gouged in the future, or by spending >$20k on hardware.
[dead]
I know it comes off as pedantic to point this out but: Those are open weight models not open source models.
Closed weight models are the equivalent of SaaS. Open weight models are the equivalent of binary driver blobs or Windows software. We don't really have actual open source LLMs, which would need to publicly release their training data and technique so you could train a similar model yourself, or use their work as a baseline for your own model.
This distinction matters because an actual open source LLM would be extremely important from an ecosystem point of view, if someone ever actually released one.