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Codex is HN's darling now because Anthropic lowered rate limits for individuals due to compute constraints. OAI has so few enterprise users they can afford to s
by solenoid0937 7mo ago
Codex is HN's darling now because Anthropic lowered rate limits for individuals due to compute constraints. OAI has so few enterprise users they can afford to subsidize compute for this group a lot more than Anthropic.
Eventually once they have more users they'll do the same thing as Anthropic, of course.
It's all a transparent PR play and it's kind of absurd to see the X/HN crowd fall for it hook, line, and sinker.
- someotherperson 7mo agoCompetition is bad? Who cares - let the big players subsidize and compete between each other. That's what we want. We want strong models at a low price, and we'll hype up whoever is doing it. Simultaneously, we also hype up the open models that are catching up. That are significantly more discounted, that also put pressure on the big players and keep them in check. People aren't falling for PR; people are encouraging the PR to put pressure on the competition. It's not that hard.
- whymememe 7mo agoI agree but I’d like to add that people are definitely falling for PR, people are always falling for PR or no one would bother with PR
- frank_nitti 7mo agoInteresting to see your observation where I have observed the opposite: posts that share big news about open-weight local models have many upvoted comments arguing local models shouldn’t be taken seriously and promoting the SOTA commercial models as the only viable options for serious developers. Here and on AI tech subreddits (ones that aren’t specifically about local or FOSS) seem to have this dynamic, to the degree I’ve suspected astroturfing. So it’s refreshing to see maybe that’s just a coincidence or confirmation bias on my end.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- bloppe 7mo agoI'm just waiting till I can afford a GPU again
- lxgr 7mo agoBoth can be true at the same time. I currently wouldn't waste my time with open models for almost all use cases, but they're crucial from a data privacy and competitive perspective, and I can't wait for them to catch up enough to be as useful as the current frontier models.
- organsnyder 7mo agoI've found qwen3 to be very usable on my local machine (a Framework Desktop with 128gb RAM). I doubt it could handle the complex tasks I throw at Claude Opus at work, but it's more than capable of doing a surprising number of tasks, with good performance.
- dotancohen 7mo agoWhat tasks do you use qwen3 for? Coding? Are you running it on CPU or GPU? What GPU does that Framework have? Thanks!
- organsnyder 7mo agoThe Framework Desktop has a Ryzen 395 chip that is able to allocate memory to either the CPU or GPU. I've been able to allocate 100+gb to the GPU, so even big models can run there. Most recently I used it to develop a script to help me manage email. The implementation included interacting with my provider over JMAP, taking various actions, and implementing an automated unsubscribe flow. It was greenfield, and quite trivial compared to the codebases I normally interact with, but it was definitely useful.
- dotancohen 7mo agoThat's great. Ostensibly my system could also allocate some of the 32 GB of system memory to argument the 12 GB VRAM, but I've not been able to get it to load models over 20B. I should spend some more time on it.
- girvo 7mo ago
- nl 7mo agoI've invested significant time into getting open models to work, and investigating what works well. The TL;DR is that unless you are doing it as a hobby or working in an environment where none of the data privacy options supported by Anthropic/OpenAI (including running on Azure/Bedrock with ZDR) work for you then it's not worth it. The best open models are around the Sonnet 4.6 level. That's excellent, but the level of tasks you can give to GPT 5.4 or Opus 4.6 is just so much higher it doesn't compare (and Opus 4.7 seems noticeably better in my few hours of testing too). I have my own benchmarks, but I like this much under-publicized OpenHands page: https://index.openhands.dev/home https://index.openhands.dev/home It shows for every task they test closed models do the best. The closest and open model gets is Minmax 2.7 on issue resolution where it's ~1% worse than the leaders. That matches my experience - fine for small problems, but well behind has the task gets bigger.
- echelon 7mo ago> Interesting to see your observation where I have observed the opposite: posts that share big news about open-weight local models have many upvoted comments arguing local models shouldn’t be taken seriously and promoting the SOTA commercial models as the only viable options for serious developers. When I argue this, my point is that FOSS shouldn't target the desktop with open weights - it should target H200s. Really big parameter models with big VRAM requirements. Those can always be distilled down, but you can't really go the other way.
- adamsmark 7mo agoLocal isn't viable yet on an economic basis, API costs are so low that you're better off taking advantage of the bonanza. As local models become more performant, so too will the ability of providers via Openrouter be able to offer them cheaper than your likely payoff period for a $4K Mac Studio 128GB. e.g Gemma 4 31B is impressive, but it costs practically nothing via Openrouter. Given that there are a ton of providers for open models, I doubt there's any subsidy going on because the providers are faceless and interchangeable. At least, that's my theory. The big advantages of local on a business level are: - Freezing your model's exact settings once you've locked in some kind of workflow that works just fine. - Guarding against insane token usage from LLMs who have been told to never stop until they figure out the solution OR setting up an LLM run incorrectly. (The last one happened to me with Gemini 3.1 Pro) - PII or some need for on-premise only LLMs.
- watwut 7mo agoBig players subsidizing is what kills medium and small players which then kills competition. What follows is monopoly. Big players operating at loss to distort the market is not a good thing overall.
- someotherperson 7mo agoThe medium and small players are literally just distilling the larger models. It's not the smaller players spending billions on training data.
- sofixa 7mo agoNo, the medium and small players are the Mistals, DeepSeek and H Company of the world, with their own models using quirky optimisation techniques to be able to compete.
- daveguy 7mo ago> Competition is bad? Who cares - let the big players subsidize and compete between each other. Subsidizing is the opposite of competing. It's literally the practice of underpricing your product to box out competition. If everyone was competing on a level playing field they would all price their products above cost. All these tech oligarch asshat companies need to be regulated to hell and back.
- ipaddr 7mo agoThe moat was already too large for smaller players. Let them subsidize. Take from investors and give to us buying me time to beef up my local stack to run local models. For many things now you need to go local and in the future if you want any privacy you'll need to go local.
- daveguy 7mo agoExcellent point, but I still think the oligarchs have gotten a little monopoly-happy.
- agentifysh 7mo agoWhat's the alternative, move to North Korea ?
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- daveguy 7mo agoWell, that's a great big wtf out of left field.
- agentifysh 7mo agoYou didn't seem to like competition or market forces pricing things. Just a suggestion.
- dmix 7mo agoThis assumes people are in touch with reality and aren't just motivated by vibes and insta-reactions on social media
- badrequest 7mo agoIt's hilarious how much this post reads as drafted by an LLM. The emdash, "it's not X, it's Y" framing, incredible.
- sph 7mo agoDogfooding by the slop factory. The artificial centipede.
- someotherperson 7mo agoI wrote my post myself.
- subscribed 7mo agoPeople use em-dashes all the time. This is why LLMs use it too. Also guess how LLMs learnt to use "it's not X, it's Y".
- luddit3 7mo agoSo Anthropic degraded their product. OAI updated their product to meet for exceeded Anthropic old product. This is normal behavior and not a cause for such a hyperbolic response.
- pizzly 7mo agoThis is the benefits of competition in action
- solenoid0937 7mo agoTo be clear, unsustainably hemorrhaging money to gain marketshare over a competitor is generally considered an anticompetitive practice.
- toraway 7mo agoWhat if both competitors are doing it?
- justapassenger 7mo agoIt’s also THE playbook of the Silicon Valley.
- guzfip 7mo agoAlso why there’s so much enthusiasm for it on HN
- solenoid0937 7mo agoThere is good competition and bad competition. Pricing your product unsustainably vs a competitor to gain market share is regarded as "bad competition" and has historically been seen as anticompetitive. It does not benefit the consumer in the long run, because the goal is to use your increased funding or cash reserve to wipe your competition out of the market, decreasing competition in the long term. Then, once your competition is gone, and you've entrenched yourself, you do a rug pull.
- greenavocado 7mo agoNot only that, but anthropic is now forcing users to give their biometric information to palantir They're doing a slow rollout
- solenoid0937 7mo agoOAI already requires this. They both require identity verification in some cases
- BrokenCogs 7mo agoThere's a systematic marketing campaign from oai on reddit and HN - there's a huge uptick of "codex is better than claude code" comments and posts this last week which is perfectly timed with the claude code increased limits
- unsupp0rted 7mo agoGo to /r/codex and see how pissed off people are by the new Codex Plus plan 5-hour limits (they're a sliver of what they were a week ago). Whatever OpenAI is doing to market on Reddit isn't working.
- toraway 7mo agoI'm not sure what changed or what the complaint is ... But personally, I have still never hit the rate limit on the $20/mo ChatGPT Plus plan, while I was constantly getting kicked off the Claude Pro plan until I got fed up and cancelled a few months ago.
- unsupp0rted 7mo agoI can get about 20 ~ 40 minutes of my 5-hour limit using Codex 5.4 medium to say write a patch script in typescript for a Firebase + BigQuery app. That's including about 10 minutes of first writing a planning.md doc with 5.2 High. A couple weeks ago I'd get roughly 2~3 hours. And a month before that I couldn't break the 5-hour limit.
- CuriouslyC 7mo agoThey were running a 2x rate limit promo last month.
- unsupp0rted 7mo agoTheoretically yes. In practice even a few weeks before it ended, the actual rate limit was down to what it was before the promo. And now I'm getting roughly 0.25x of what I got before the promo.
- yoyohello13 7mo agoThere was brief consternation when OpenAI swooped in to snatch up those DoD contracts but then the next model released and all is forgiven.
- olcay_ 7mo agoAnthropic coming out to say they won't surveil Americans wasn't actually a positive for me. It meant they're okay with surveilling the rest of the world, which in turn signaled "fuck you, you're inferior, deal with it" to me (as someone from the aforementioned rest of the world). When OpenAI snatched those contracts, it made me think no worse of OpenAI. The surveillance was already factored into how I saw them (both).
- keeganpoppen 7mo agoeveryone seems to unconditionally love anthropic, but openai has always had the best models… it just requires a bit more effort on behalf of the user to actually leverage it.
- kar1181 7mo agoThis is true. But Anthropic did us dirty most recently and so it’s their turn on the pitch fork. Sam will do us too. Just not yet.
- the__alchemist 7mo agoCall it fall for it, but here are my two experiences, with both applications open. ($20/month plan for both) - Claude: Good for ~20 minutes of work once every 4 hours - Codex: Good for however long I want to use it. Claude nerfed their product so that it's not usable, so I use something else.
- KronisLV 7mo agoI'm on the 100 USD plan with Anthropic, I hit the 5 hour limits about 75% of the time during working hours, but almost never the weekly ones - by the time they're reset I've usually used up between 50% - 75% of the quota. There are periods of more intense usage ofc, but this is the approx. situation I'm in (also it doesn't work on tasks while I'm asleep, because I occasionally like having a look at WIP stuff and intervene if needed). The Anthropic 20 USD plan would more or less be a non-starter for agentic development, at least for the projects that I work on, even while only working on a single codebase or task at a time (I usually do 1-3 at a time). I would be absolutely bankrupt if I had to pay per-token. That said, I do mostly just throw Opus at everything (though it sometimes picks Sonnet/Haiku for sub-agents for specific tasks, which is okay), so probably not a 100% optional approach, but I've wasted too much time and effort in the past on sub-optimal (non-SOTA) models anyways. I wonder which is closer to the actual cost and how much subsidizing there is going on.
- the__alchemist 7mo agoConcur, re the ratio of weekly vs hourly limits: I hit the hourly one much more often than weekly.
- bitmasher9 7mo agoThe $200 openai plan feels like 10x the limit as the $100 claude plan. But Opus is both smarter and faster than GPT, so I can get a lot more done during the Claude limits.
- lsdmtme 7mo agofor now... right now you are getting 2x usage as a promo
- chaos_emergent 7mo agoThinking in counterfactuals, how would the hype around Codex would be different if it was organic and because they had built a genuinely good product? Asking as someone who genuinely loves Codex and has been in the OpenAI camp for months after buying a Claude Max plan from November to February.
- junofan 7mo agoI haven’t noticed much hype around Codex. I have both and use Claude for broad work off my phone and Codex on my computer to clean up the mess. Crank reasoning to the highest setting for each. Claude is extremely unreliable for me, and Codex feels like more of a real tool. I’d say Codex has a bit of a learning curve. Nothing much has changed for me in the past month or two (whenever GPT 5.4 came out).
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- jsemrau 7mo agoCodex is much worse than Anthropics model. My experience is that I burn 10x the tokens using Codex compared to Sonnet 4.6
- HWR_14 7mo agoAnd hopefully Anthropic has extra capacity then and I can return there.
- raincole 7mo ago> because Anthropic lowered rate limits for individuals due to compute constraints It's because they don't support OpenCode.
- m3nu 7mo agoI have a feeling that Codex is also getting lower limits. Got this email just now. Basically they copy Claude's $100 tier. > To help you go further with Codex, we’re introducing a new €114 Pro tier designed for longer, high-intensity sessions. > At launch, this new tier includes a limited-time Codex usage boost, with up to 10x more Codex usage than Plus (typically 5x). > As the Codex promotion on Plus winds down today, we’re rebalancing Plus usage to support more sessions across the week, rather than longer high-intensity sessions on a single day.
- giancarlostoro 7mo agoThey didnt just lower limits they keep messing with peoples local settings and I wish it would be called out drastically more because it could cause serious issues. A coding agents settings are a contract, even the default ones, if they worked for me for 9 months and now you are changing defaults on me, you shouldnt just force new defaults on me without warning, Claude can and will goof up hard if misconfigured.
- zmmmmm 7mo agoIt's one of the things I really dislike about providers hyping "inference time scaling" as a concept. Apart from being a blatant misnomer (there's nothing scalable about it), it's so transparently a dial they can manipulate to shape perception. If they want a model to seem more intelligent than it really is, just dial up the "thinking" and burn tokens. Then once you have people fooled, you can dial it down again. Everyone will assume its their own fault that their AI suddenly isn't working properly. And since it's almost entirely unmeasurable you can do it selectively for any given product you want to pitch for any period of time you like and then pull the rug. We need to force them back into being providers of commodity services and hit this assumption they can mold things in real time on the head.
- AlexCoventry 7mo agoIt's quite likely that OpenAI is running a significant PR campaign to compensate for the bad rep they earned by stepping in to meet the demands of the Trump administration, after Anthropic refused to assist the administration with mass domestic surveillance and development of lethal autonomous weapons. Presumably OpenAI didn't buy the podcast TBPN just because they like the guys. https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
- ra 7mo agoAnthropic don't seem to know how to look after and keep customers.
- iterateoften 7mo agoNo it’s because Anthropic can’t message anything to its customers without lying.
- a34729t 7mo agoUber, but AI!
- khacvy 7mo agoI really hate this kind of behavior. Yeah, Anthropic may do some bad things, I don't know, but we all see that Anthropic is always one step ahead of OpenAI. And just because Anthropic lowered rates for some people, people now start saying that Codex is way better than Claude Code / Claude Desktop.
- xnx 7mo agoIf only there were a third major player, maybe one who was even much more established as a cloud provider...