There is minimal downside to switching to open models

julianlam•about 1 hour ago

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.

kgeist•11 minutes 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. There's no secret sauce, it just takes time.

taormina•20 minutes 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•13 minutes 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).

mdale•44 minutes ago

I think the frontier will command premium for sometime just as slight better software developers were 10x's vs their peers as their architecture & development strategies and code approach compounded quickly. One less error per block of work compounds quickly.

Sure, there may be some cases and reasons for local models and industry is so large they will continue to make progress and gather economic value and users for specific use case; but frontier will command vast majority of the economic value distinct from Linux and open source where the model created better than proriatary economic incentives around development

radhitya•12 minutes ago

Have you read about Opencode Go? They are great provider for open model, like GLM 5.2, Deepseek v4 Pro, Kimi 2.7 Code. You should give it shot to them :-)

PcChip•about 1 hour ago

Is it just me or is half the article missing?

I enjoyed the first part though

DANmode•about 1 hour ago

But, what model are you using?

and what hardware are you using?

0gs•about 1 hour ago

yeah, on a 96GB Mac Studio and Gemma+Qwen, it's definitely fully doable. fully doable but not really for coding on 16GB. but svelter models and cheaper (eventually) hardware are coming!

nezuzen•about 1 hour ago

"cheaper (eventually) hardware" Best case 2-3 years from now. Otherwise it will take a major global recession to get us anywhere near last year's prices.

There is minimal downside to switching to open models

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