alt Hacker NewsQuit my Claude pro subscription last week and purchased credits for an API inference provider. I think I might even end up saving money, since I really don’t use AI that much, and I actually found that gemma4:31b is fine for most of my non-coding inquiries.
Gemma is amazing with tools for anything that is not crazy complex. I think a lot of people have a wrong perception of it because Google's new prompt format broke implementations like llama.cpp and it took quite a while to get everything sorted. But even the tiny variants running on edge devices are surprisingly capable when used right.
The frontier will probably keep moving for a while, but it will be increasingly disconnected from normal human use. In the future, if you're not trying to solve a research level math problem, you'll probably do it locally and fully privately. Which also means the payday when they will fundamentally no longer be able to reach a billion users with frontier models will come soon for the labs. Even if they do get their IPO out, it will probably crash and burn at current valuations.