alt Hacker NewsI think people in this thread who claim local models are anywhere close to Claude are completely detached from reality. 200$ Ultra sub is the best value ever offered in history of subscriptions. I got 3 running and would pay at least 3x more for them before looking at alternatives. If your local models or some DeepSeek on cheap provider or whatever you install instead of Claude makes even 2-3 more mistakes per week you are already losing money assuming your time is worth average software dev salary.
I don't think it's remotely close either - Claude is that good. The problem is that it's not how Anthropic plans to make money to justify 1.5T-2T valuation. That would require companies paying API prices on long term big contracts and that makes it a completely different value proposition.
The argument is not that they are as good, but that more models have reached the threshold for being useful. You do not need the best for most tasks these days. Freedom from closed model vendors also has value.
This is why token prices are falling and there are expectations for commoditization. In another year or two, you will have Opus 5.5 in much smaller models, assuming capability distillation remains as good as it has been from mega -> mini models.