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I think it's interesting that people write off open weight models because they're "a few months behind" proprietary models. I know LLMs move at the speed of li

I think it's interesting that people write off open weight models because they're "a few months behind" proprietary models. I know LLMs move at the speed of light (especially these past few quarters), but if Opus and GPT "a few months ago" were really like open weight models, then there's really no reason to not switch, especially for those who were using these models a few months ago. Your codebase didn't change, so use the open weight model. Don't move the goalposts.

taormina 4mo ago
For that matter, the new models are shit. If I’m using Opus 4.6 anyway to get anything actually done, then great, we’re actually entirely caught up then.
TacticalCoder 4mo ago
> I think it's interesting that people write off open weight models because they're "a few months behind" proprietary models. The really interesting thing is that it's typically those very same accounts who were explaining, a few months ago, that thanks to their commercial model they were gaining so much time and producing so much fantastic code. A few months passes and suddenly the open-source model have caught up with the models that were gaining them so much time and that produced amazing code (in production everywhere for sure btw) but... It's impossible to work with these models. Rinse and repeat. The current models, according to them, are basically AGI and they can go fishing while paid subscriptions solve the world's problems. But when it six months there shall be new closed, pricey, models and when the open ones shall have reach the level of Fable, we'll hear how it's impossible to work in late 2026 on a model that is "only at the level of Fable". These people should have been snake-oil salesmen (and it could be what they actually are).
- nemomarx 4mo ago
  My most charitable interpretation that there's some honeymoon effect for each release, and people genuinely feel very productive and useful for 2-3 months. By the time the next big model release happens they've seen some issues or run into something that makes them feel like the new model will fix all that and improve their flow so much, etc. Not unusual in the tech space, but this has been basically constantly happening for two years now? I can't imagine the improvements are more than incremental at this point.
  - windexh8er 4mo ago
    They are generally referred to as the Kool-Aid drinkers. There's always something holding them back from open models. It's no different than the argument in the article. I've been daily driving Linux for well over 20 years at this point and while things have gotten easier they haven't gotten that much easier. There's always been a distro that's focused on new users or ease of use. I used to take for granted the Linux distro ecosystem but now worry how Microsoft, Apple and others will continue to try and legislate compute into a corner. I can appreciate good engineering, but when I look at OS X and Windows they're both failing end users in different ways. Just like the OS ecosystem I think we'll see a similar trajectory with OAI, Anthropic and Google but on a much accelerated time scale. I think the lobbying has begun to lock in their fate for revenue - because none of them give a shit about their users. I do hope, however, that Anthropic continues to over rotate and continue to gimp their models into uselessness. I just asked Opus 4.8 the other day to look at some code as an adversary and summarize areas that should be addressed. Nothing specific and it shut down the conversation. However starting a new prompt and prodding the model from a different angle yielded the results I asked for directly. Pick a lane. Or, don't and continue to lose industry respect and consideration.
kgeist 4mo ago
Every new proprietary model is "groundbreaking" and "look, it just solved task X that no other model could solve," only to be referred to as "that crappy previous-generation model" a month later. So yeah, I'm totally fine using Kimi-2.7, GLM-5.2 or Deepseek-v4. I think we've already hit the ceiling and most improvements now seem to be from harness improvements and slightly better RL to improve reasoning/tool calling.
- 4fffs 4mo ago
  Correct. Anything else is pure marketing and you have fallen for it.
- jbverschoor 4mo ago
  Not only that, but to me it seems that after a week the intelligence is being downscaled or routed. Maybe because of lack of capacity
  - conception 4mo ago
    You can check https://marginlab.ai/trackers/codex/ https://marginlab.ai/trackers/codex/ It’s pretty good at catching when performance is degraded. It was for a week or so before Fable launched for instance, probably due to a/b testing or capacity as you noted.
- matheusmoreira 4mo ago
  There's at least the possibility that they intentionally degrade the models as time passes. We can't really verify that we're getting what we're paying for all of the time. All the more reason to invest in local inference.
  - taytus 4mo ago
    At current prices, and considering these OS Models' performance, investing in local inference sounds like a bad idea.
    - 4mo ago
dwoosley 4mo ago
The only reason I'm on HN right now reading this post is because the Anthropic's API is down... so there's another point for self hosted.
Gigachad 4mo ago
The reason for me is work pays for Github Copilot which doesn't have these open modals.
tonfreed 4mo ago
Even just one of the smaller models is good enough for the grunt work I use them for 90% of the time. Currently doing most of my home hobby projects with OpenCode Go and Qwen 3.7 Plus, it's not great at diagnosing issues in the code, but if I can clearly articulate a test suite or boilerplate refactoring it works fine.
- nomel 4mo ago
  > I use them for 90% of the time 10% failure rate would drive me absolutely insane.
Aurornis 4mo ago
> I think it's interesting that people write off open weight models because they're "a few months behind" proprietary models I experiment a lot with the open models and I’m getting tired of this trope. I’m not yet convinced that even the best open weight models are equal to Opus from “a few months” ago. I know what the benchmarks say. I had higher hopes. My real experience just doesn’t match the benchmarks. I also do a lot of work that even Opus 4.8 struggles with. When even the cutting edge LLMs aren’t all the way there yet, my motivation to switch to something even further behind just isn’t there.
- iot_devs 4mo ago
  I would love if you could make some examples
- CamperBob2 4mo ago
  Have you found anything specific that the full-precision quant of GLM 5.2 can't do that Opus 4.8 can? I haven't, so far. 5.2 lives up to the hype. I don't find it to be the best at anything except coding. But for coding... yeah, it lives up to the hype. Not quite Opus 4.8-level, but I would feel comfortable comparing it to 4.5, at least if it had vision capabilities.
- OtomotO 4mo ago
  > My real experience just doesn’t match the benchmarks. That's exactly the problem I have... with Anthropic and "Open""AI"
itwaswatson 4mo ago
We have a provider with Deepseek V4 flash at our work. It can handle 95% of the "actually functional" workload at a tenth of the cost. I still pull up beefier ones sometimes, but that's after some consideration. The moat is so flat, it only gives +1 food and +1 production. +1 gold with a road.
- calgoo 4mo ago
  Same, i feel that V4 Flash is great at task implementation, but im still looking at bigger models for design. Now, GLM 5.2 with high thinking is actually getting really close now. I have switched for all personal projects right now and am quite happy with the results. I think the magic is in the big context window (1m) + a lot of thinking gets us very close to at least Opus 4.6 level. Im currently running directly on z.ai with a lite coding plan, and have bought API credit on deekseek as well. I will be looking at EU based hosts next and then i might switch over some of the more critical flows.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
827a 4mo ago
Intelligence is maybe a few months behind. But cost sadly is further behind. GLM-5.2 has a deceptively high cost during day-to-day usage for e.g. coding because 1) it has to think a ton more than GPT-5.5/Opus-4.8 to get to competitive results; 2) many providers are still figuring out caching; and 3) API pricing for Codex/Claude can be as high as 40x more than subscription pricing, which distorts the market.
moomoo11 4mo ago
ok but your competition using the latest models has an advantage not all of us are doing noob shit lol
- 59nadir 4mo ago
  Heh, if you're using LLMs heavily for work I think odds are pretty good you're doing pretty trivial stuff. It might not be trivial to you, but you're probably just not very good at this.
  - derwiki 4mo ago
    Pretty sure the big quant shops heavily use LLM; maybe it’s trivial stuff and they just work 100 hrs/week?
    - 59nadir 4mo ago
      Anyone who heavily uses LLMs for their work is pretty obviously ill-equipped for their work, and likely getting even worse at it with time, yes. You can throw around as many "things people from the US worship because they make money" positions/industries as you want. Nevermind that you're "pretty sure". People who both know what LLMs are actually capable of without major issues, plus are already capable enough to do their job don't need to use LLMs heavily, they'll use them for what little they're actually useful for. Only incompetent (or uninterested & incompetent) people lean on them very heavily. Edit: To clarify what I mean by this: Anyone who uses LLMs for larger-than-small-module code generation, pretend-not-vibecoding (a.k.a spec-driven development), or outright vibecoding, etc., is using an LLM "heavily", IMO. The appropriate things to use them for is information retrieval, plus as a basic extra signal in debugging, code understanding, quality checks, and so on. Also, it's not illegal to be incompetent. Most people were incompetent long before LLMs showed up, it's not some rarity.
      - moomoo11 4mo ago
        bro go do your tickets lmfao
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
qznc 4mo ago
To be a little bit more precise than "a few months behind", what probably matters is before or after "Claude Opus 4.5 from Nov 24, 2025". That was the model which started the OpenClaw hype over Christmas.
derwiki 4mo ago
OOC did an LLM write this? The last sentence feels very LLM

taormina 4mo ago

For that matter, the new models are shit. If I’m using Opus 4.6 anyway to get anything actually done, then great, we’re actually entirely caught up then.

TacticalCoder 4mo ago

> I think it's interesting that people write off open weight models because they're "a few months behind" proprietary models. The really interesting thing is that it's typically those very same accounts who were explaining, a few months ago, that thanks to their commercial model they were gaining so much time and producing so much fantastic code. A few months passes and suddenly the open-source model have caught up with the models that were gaining them so much time and that produced amazing code (in production everywhere for sure btw) but... It's impossible to work with these models. Rinse and repeat. The current models, according to them, are basically AGI and they can go fishing while paid subscriptions solve the world's problems. But when it six months there shall be new closed, pricey, models and when the open ones shall have reach the level of Fable, we'll hear how it's impossible to work in late 2026 on a model that is "only at the level of Fable". These people should have been snake-oil salesmen (and it could be what they actually are).

nemomarx 4mo ago
My most charitable interpretation that there's some honeymoon effect for each release, and people genuinely feel very productive and useful for 2-3 months. By the time the next big model release happens they've seen some issues or run into something that makes them feel like the new model will fix all that and improve their flow so much, etc. Not unusual in the tech space, but this has been basically constantly happening for two years now? I can't imagine the improvements are more than incremental at this point.
- windexh8er 4mo ago
  They are generally referred to as the Kool-Aid drinkers. There's always something holding them back from open models. It's no different than the argument in the article. I've been daily driving Linux for well over 20 years at this point and while things have gotten easier they haven't gotten that much easier. There's always been a distro that's focused on new users or ease of use. I used to take for granted the Linux distro ecosystem but now worry how Microsoft, Apple and others will continue to try and legislate compute into a corner. I can appreciate good engineering, but when I look at OS X and Windows they're both failing end users in different ways. Just like the OS ecosystem I think we'll see a similar trajectory with OAI, Anthropic and Google but on a much accelerated time scale. I think the lobbying has begun to lock in their fate for revenue - because none of them give a shit about their users. I do hope, however, that Anthropic continues to over rotate and continue to gimp their models into uselessness. I just asked Opus 4.8 the other day to look at some code as an adversary and summarize areas that should be addressed. Nothing specific and it shut down the conversation. However starting a new prompt and prodding the model from a different angle yielded the results I asked for directly. Pick a lane. Or, don't and continue to lose industry respect and consideration.

kgeist 4mo ago

Every new proprietary model is "groundbreaking" and "look, it just solved task X that no other model could solve," only to be referred to as "that crappy previous-generation model" a month later. So yeah, I'm totally fine using Kimi-2.7, GLM-5.2 or Deepseek-v4. I think we've already hit the ceiling and most improvements now seem to be from harness improvements and slightly better RL to improve reasoning/tool calling.

4fffs 4mo ago
Correct. Anything else is pure marketing and you have fallen for it.
jbverschoor 4mo ago
Not only that, but to me it seems that after a week the intelligence is being downscaled or routed. Maybe because of lack of capacity
- conception 4mo ago
  You can check https://marginlab.ai/trackers/codex/ https://marginlab.ai/trackers/codex/ It’s pretty good at catching when performance is degraded. It was for a week or so before Fable launched for instance, probably due to a/b testing or capacity as you noted.
matheusmoreira 4mo ago
There's at least the possibility that they intentionally degrade the models as time passes. We can't really verify that we're getting what we're paying for all of the time. All the more reason to invest in local inference.
- taytus 4mo ago
  At current prices, and considering these OS Models' performance, investing in local inference sounds like a bad idea.
  - 4mo ago

dwoosley 4mo ago

The only reason I'm on HN right now reading this post is because the Anthropic's API is down... so there's another point for self hosted.

Gigachad 4mo ago

The reason for me is work pays for Github Copilot which doesn't have these open modals.

tonfreed 4mo ago

Even just one of the smaller models is good enough for the grunt work I use them for 90% of the time. Currently doing most of my home hobby projects with OpenCode Go and Qwen 3.7 Plus, it's not great at diagnosing issues in the code, but if I can clearly articulate a test suite or boilerplate refactoring it works fine.

nomel 4mo ago
> I use them for 90% of the time 10% failure rate would drive me absolutely insane.

Aurornis 4mo ago

> I think it's interesting that people write off open weight models because they're "a few months behind" proprietary models I experiment a lot with the open models and I’m getting tired of this trope. I’m not yet convinced that even the best open weight models are equal to Opus from “a few months” ago. I know what the benchmarks say. I had higher hopes. My real experience just doesn’t match the benchmarks. I also do a lot of work that even Opus 4.8 struggles with. When even the cutting edge LLMs aren’t all the way there yet, my motivation to switch to something even further behind just isn’t there.

iot_devs 4mo ago
I would love if you could make some examples
CamperBob2 4mo ago
Have you found anything specific that the full-precision quant of GLM 5.2 can't do that Opus 4.8 can? I haven't, so far. 5.2 lives up to the hype. I don't find it to be the best at anything except coding. But for coding... yeah, it lives up to the hype. Not quite Opus 4.8-level, but I would feel comfortable comparing it to 4.5, at least if it had vision capabilities.
OtomotO 4mo ago
> My real experience just doesn’t match the benchmarks. That's exactly the problem I have... with Anthropic and "Open""AI"

itwaswatson 4mo ago

We have a provider with Deepseek V4 flash at our work. It can handle 95% of the "actually functional" workload at a tenth of the cost. I still pull up beefier ones sometimes, but that's after some consideration. The moat is so flat, it only gives +1 food and +1 production. +1 gold with a road.

calgoo 4mo ago
Same, i feel that V4 Flash is great at task implementation, but im still looking at bigger models for design. Now, GLM 5.2 with high thinking is actually getting really close now. I have switched for all personal projects right now and am quite happy with the results. I think the magic is in the big context window (1m) + a lot of thinking gets us very close to at least Opus 4.6 level. Im currently running directly on z.ai with a lite coding plan, and have bought API credit on deekseek as well. I will be looking at EU based hosts next and then i might switch over some of the more critical flows.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

827a 4mo ago

Intelligence is maybe a few months behind. But cost sadly is further behind. GLM-5.2 has a deceptively high cost during day-to-day usage for e.g. coding because 1) it has to think a ton more than GPT-5.5/Opus-4.8 to get to competitive results; 2) many providers are still figuring out caching; and 3) API pricing for Codex/Claude can be as high as 40x more than subscription pricing, which distorts the market.

moomoo11 4mo ago

ok but your competition using the latest models has an advantage not all of us are doing noob shit lol

59nadir 4mo ago
Heh, if you're using LLMs heavily for work I think odds are pretty good you're doing pretty trivial stuff. It might not be trivial to you, but you're probably just not very good at this.
- derwiki 4mo ago
  Pretty sure the big quant shops heavily use LLM; maybe it’s trivial stuff and they just work 100 hrs/week?
  - 59nadir 4mo ago
    Anyone who heavily uses LLMs for their work is pretty obviously ill-equipped for their work, and likely getting even worse at it with time, yes. You can throw around as many "things people from the US worship because they make money" positions/industries as you want. Nevermind that you're "pretty sure". People who both know what LLMs are actually capable of without major issues, plus are already capable enough to do their job don't need to use LLMs heavily, they'll use them for what little they're actually useful for. Only incompetent (or uninterested & incompetent) people lean on them very heavily. Edit: To clarify what I mean by this: Anyone who uses LLMs for larger-than-small-module code generation, pretend-not-vibecoding (a.k.a spec-driven development), or outright vibecoding, etc., is using an LLM "heavily", IMO. The appropriate things to use them for is information retrieval, plus as a basic extra signal in debugging, code understanding, quality checks, and so on. Also, it's not illegal to be incompetent. Most people were incompetent long before LLMs showed up, it's not some rarity.
    - moomoo11 4mo ago
      bro go do your tickets lmfao

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

qznc 4mo ago

To be a little bit more precise than "a few months behind", what probably matters is before or after "Claude Opus 4.5 from Nov 24, 2025". That was the model which started the OpenClaw hype over Christmas.

derwiki 4mo ago

OOC did an LLM write this? The last sentence feels very LLM