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Listen - that's the sound of millions of companies and users doubling down on Chinese models. It might be a national security problem for other nations to have
by zmmmmm 4mo ago
Listen - that's the sound of millions of companies and users doubling down on Chinese models.
It might be a national security problem for other nations to have access to these models. But it's equally now a national security problem for any other nation to depend on them. Or US tech in general.
- paulmist 4mo agoAren't biggest Qwen 3.7 closed? I don't suspect China's policy here would be anything but ruthless.
- andrewchambers 4mo agodeepseek v4 pro is great and open weight.
- EchoVoicy 4mo agoIt is, and I love it, but it isn't capable of performing the tasks I've been giving to Opus, let alone Fable. Don't get me wrong, I use it, it's fast-smart-and affordable. But not suitable for all tasks.
- droidjj 4mo agoWhat kinds of tasks are you finding deepseek v4 incapable of?
- EchoVoicy 4mo agoFor starters, there's a C++ application written with MFC and an absolute ton of inline assembly and threading (yes, in a 1990's C++ application). I'm porting it to MacOS/Linux currently. Opus 4.6+ is able to make slow progress, but it takes several revisions per workstream. It requires constant supervision as it often creates convoluted solutions that expand the code in bloated ways. It works, but still requires my constant input. Fable was able to almost one shot most of the big migrations with very few bugs, and was able to fix those bugs with 1 review pass. I almost didn't believe it. I was able to put it on a task (with dangerous permissions) and come back hours later to see it done, working, and clean. I tried DeepSeek v4 and it wasn't able to make any meaningful progress at all. It kept creating dangling pointers and had trouble understanding the inline assempbly needed to be replaced if we were to compile for 64 bit. It kept getting stuck and looping on the same problem, without making progress. What I do use DeepSeek for is lots of my automations on my websites. I find DeepSeek is fantastically cheap and fast and effective as summarization, collation, generating reports, finding and reporting issues from logs, etc. But I haven't found a way to get it to effectively port 90's C++ code to modern, cross-platform standards. But I want to be clear- I really like DeepSeek and use it wherever I can.. I mean.. it's so affordable!
- noworriesnate 4mo agoI was building a cli tool that showed a graph of git commits, kind of like git log --graph, and deepseek v4 simply could not figure out a specific ui quirk where things weren't lining up correctly. I spent like $0.10 and 30 minutes trying to figure it out on deepseek. Then I had deepseek summarize the bug, gave it to Opus, and it solved it in $1.12 and five minutes.
- epolanski 4mo agoFun fact, I was trying this afternoon Deepseek vs Opus 4.8 high, and I was surprised at how good Deepseek was. It outperformed Opus 4.8 on multiple occasions. Found just later I was using v4 flash and not pro (for mistakenly setting the model to deepseek-chat and not v4-pro). There are aspects about Deepseek I don't like though, when pushed against it will eagerly bend instead of reasoning and advocating for his points, something Opus 4.7 and later models started doing a lot (even when wrong).
- girvo 4mo agoMiniMax M3 is surprisingly powerful, and open weight (or is about to be). There's others in this space too: MiMo v2.5, GLM 5.1. There's quite a few to pick from if you want strong models running on "your" hardware.
- ac29 4mo agoAll current Qwen 3.7 models are closed though they have said more releases are coming
- epolanski 4mo agoUS is well known to impose world wide embargoes on technologies and resources that they pretend to apply to companies beyond its borders. And it works, because the American market is generally more important than the markets of these countries 9 times out of 10.
- ks2048 4mo agoWait until it is illegal to download or use Chinese models (only half-joking).
- sh34r 4mo agoGood thing these corrupt gerontocrats are also all in on cryptocurrency then.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- platinumrad 4mo agoAnthropic is explicitly lobbying for this.
- fosco 4mo agoKnow where I can read about that?
- platinumrad 4mo agoThe two main bills I'm aware of are the Decoupling America's AI Capabilities from China Act and No Adversarial AI Act. The former would have made it illegal for any American citizen to simply use DeepSeek. I couldn't find any lobbying data, but the obvious effect is that Americans would be forced to pay for more expensive domestic alternatives. A House committee also recently probed Cursor and Airbnb for using Chinese models, rather than more expensive American alternatives. A sexagenarian Congressman gave a nonsense quote that he certainly did not come up with himself,[1] which sounds very similar to language Anthropic uses in its marketing materials.[2][3] [1] https://www.semafor.com/article/04/29/2026/house-committee-probes-cursor-parent-airbnb-over-chinese-ai https://www.semafor.com/article/04/29/2026/house-committee-p... [2] https://www.anthropic.com/news/updating-restrictions-of-sales-to-unsupported-regions https://www.anthropic.com/news/updating-restrictions-of-sale... [3] https://www.anthropic.com/research/2028-ai-leadership https://www.anthropic.com/research/2028-ai-leadership
- nonethewiser 4mo agoWhich models? Im curious what kind of more specific hypothesis you're willing to put forth. Anthropic going to lose 20-30-40-50% of users to Deepseek? What?
- bigyabai 4mo agoI quit paying for Claude Code to buy z.ai's coding plan for use with OpenCode. I'm not a power user, but I don't regret switching away from Claude. OpenCode is generally nicer for my work.
- pkulak 4mo agoWhy z.ai and not an ollama pro plan that can use all the open models? Real question, not snark. I've only ever done ollama and wonder what I'm missing.
- bigyabai 4mo agoBecause I bought a year's subscription in December, when it was still $6/mo :P I have decently capable hardware, but stuff like Qwen 3.6 and Gemma 4 still doesn't compare to agentic editing with a frontier model. Right now, OpenCode's $10/mo "Go" plan is what I'd be looking to try once my year expires.
- commanderkeen08 4mo agoThe z.ai was stupid cheap during the great anthropic opencode rugpull.
- cube00 4mo ago> I've only ever done ollama and wonder what I'm missing. Friends Don't Let Friends Use Ollama https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47788385 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47788385
- garciasn 4mo agoI guess if it works for you, great; that’s why competition is a good thing. Enjoy.
- tkgally 4mo agoAs it happens, the current number-two article on HN is about a similar consequence of Chinese export controls--a car manufacturer developing electric motors that do not use rare earths: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48510010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48510010
- dyauspitr 4mo agoYeah because they’re just using electromagnets. Those motors are not better than the rare earth ones.
- kccqzy 4mo agoRealpolitik in action. Great powers just impose export controls because they know they can and they think it would be beneficial to the nation.
- roenxi 4mo agoThe incentives around OSS become stronger the further down in the list of market leaders a company is. The #1 company has no particular incentive to push open software apart from a belief that the market is going to be come commoditised anyway. But the 2nd or 3rd largest player has actual incentives to break the market up and remove software quality as a consideration. No #10 may as well not bother with a proprietary option since if they make it a software quality battle they're going to lose each customer 9 times anyway. Just because the Chinese are running export controls in one market doesn't mean that they're going to close of access to AI. They might, but each market should be considered in isolation.
- Aurornis 4mo ago> Listen - that's the sound of millions of companies and users doubling down on Chinese models. They’re falling back to Opus 4.8. Most people weren’t using Fable for everything anyway because it’s so expensive. None of open weights models are even at Opus 4.8 levels. If someone was using Fable they don’t have any second best alternative outside of Anthropic.
- itopaloglu83 4mo agoA sample of one, but I was getting more stuff done despite Fable uses tokens twice as fast as Opus, because it understood the goals so well and worked to achieve them.
- consumer451 4mo agoSame here, now n=2.
- toss1 4mo agoSame here, not n=3, plus the above 3 reporting, so n=6 and rising Fable was definitely better for a variety of tasks, even accounting for using 2X the token rate, like the way it used the tokens faster reduced the wasted tokens, as least for the subset of those who already knew at least some optimizations...?
- 2001zhaozhao 4mo ago> more stuff done More stuff done per dollar or more stuff done for more dollars? Seems to be an important distinction
- itopaloglu83 4mo agoGiven the same usage limits, I was able to get more stuff done and not even hit the usage limits, because I wasn't working on constantly fixing what Opus was trying to do, Fable just understands the task correctly and works great with the given context.
- 256BitChris 4mo agoNo one serious is using the open models. Using them is like traveling back 2-2.5 years in time and using ChatGPT.
- zmmmmm 4mo agoDeepSeekv4 Pro is roughly Opus 4.5 - Opus 4.6 in my estimation. That's about 8 months difference, not 2.5 years. It's definitely not as good. But it's also definitely good enough.
- untcarcandy 4mo ago[dead]
- EchoVoicy 4mo agoCurious- in what tasks? I find Opus 4.5/4.6 too expensive and have tried to migrate to DeepSeek for C++ work, but found it couldn't cut it. What's your DSv4 setup? What harness? It sounds like I should give it another try!
- lbreakjai 4mo agoI use DSv4 through opencode. I use it from deepseek directly, not through a third-party platform. I mostly do C# and some frontend. I was starting to feel really depressed and unengaged at work because I was starting to use AI far too much like a magic slot machine. I'm now making a conscious effort to go back to using it as a tool used a bit more deliberately. I'm not even using the pro model. The flash version is fast so I can keep it interactive rather than context switching to reddit while the model is working, and it turns out using my brain means I don't really need the model to be that smart. I spent about $1.5 this week.
- zmmmmm 4mo agoworks really well with pi for small to medium sized coding tasks for me - C++ is an interesting case since it's probably more challenging just due to the complexity of the syntax. But it works great with Groovy which is another slightly off-mainstream language (these days).
- rw2 4mo agoNot really, they are not even as good as opus 4.7
- anonzzzies 4mo agoSo, a few month difference... Definitely usable as far as we found, especially being so much cheaper.
- miyuru 4mo agoyes, I am using mimo code(free version) for the last 2 days. I gets the job done for me. If I need to upgrade, the plan start at $6, so its a no brainer.
- WarmWash 4mo agoYou are drinking the cool aid if you think the CCP is going to let the world get ahead of China using CCP models.
- operatingthetan 4mo agoDo you mean Kool-Aid?
- aabhay 4mo agoBanned Aid
- epolanski 4mo agoThey are? They have pioneered and been very influential in different aspects of LLM engineering and research, while also publishing in the open. You would not have Fable 5 as good as it is without Chinese work.
- dyauspitr 4mo agoTo do what? I mean they’re good models, but frankly, they fucking suck (relatively speaking). I’m not looking to going back to a week of back-and-forth with the LLM once I’ve gotten used to all this one shotting.
- laichzeit0 4mo agoAs a non-US person, I will use whatever is the best and reasonably priced. I could not give one iota about who makes or hosts these models. The origin or political leanings of these models mean nothing in my usage calculus.
- hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm 4mo agoChinese models are next, the whole reason this is happening is because they don't want China to steal their tech. It is no secret anymore that they have been distilling US models. That's why it is explicitly aimed at foreign nationals.
- epolanski 4mo agoAs an European I'm happy to be convincing my clients from years to move out of any us dependencies. It's tough, US technologies are everywhere but they are only liabilities. Microsoft is the stickiest of all.
- utilize1808 4mo agoUS will ban American companies from using Chinese models and also ban them from dealing with companies who use Chinese models. “Code produced by Chinese models may be deliberately introduce backdoors and vulnerabilities” that kind of thing.