Well, you can say that all day long but realistically would your “small startup” even exist if your firm was charged Enterprise rates or the actual compute costs and denied access to capital to subsidize your users? It’s a fair question.

The other, more complex one would be “what benefit” are you talking about? Clearly there are some differences in performance regarding speed and token cost, but industry news indicates not a single one has solved the inherent hallucination problem which makes the reliability akin to an untreated schizophrenic research or coding assistant.

> you have roughly the same performance,

From actually using these models, I disagree. The open weight models are nice for lower cost tasks, but having spent time with a lot of models I cannot agree that the open weight models are roughly the same performance.

Most of us use subscription plans for personal work, which makes the price difference to the hosted open weights models smaller or negligible. I’d rather spend a little more if it reduces the time I have to spend reworking or restarting with new prompts.

Kimi K3 might be close, but it’s not actually open weight yet. They’ve just committed to releasing the weights. The only provider you can get it from is Moonshot. I haven’t spent too much time with it, but from what I’ve seen it’s not actually Fable level even though some benchmarks say that.

>and you have an order of magnitude more bang for your buck

Maybe if you're paying API rates, but if your usage fits within the American labs' plan reset windows (5-hour + weekly limits), their plans are likely cheaper than chinese models, because they're heavily discounted[1]

[1] https://x.com/SemiAnalysis_/status/2064815044085318040

How does it connect to let's say, vscode. I would love to move away from Claude, but it's really easy to set up. Just add a vscode extension

The Chinese models are only temporarily cheaper, because they are subsidised the same way that frontier models are. Once those companies need to make money the subsidy will disappear.

The barriers for me are lower quality (perceived and actual), upfront cost, and more choices to make.

China bad. Or if you want to rationalize your xenophobia, you’d say the Chinese models will secretly backdoor your code and kill your grandma.

Is censorship not an issue with Chinese models?

One of the people I know works in really sensitive healthcare and I asked them the same thing out of curiosity. Now aside from the first doubt of any thing could be removed because of as you say nearby hosted Chinese model.

The reasons are:

1. A less valid reason but (iirc) its their clients who believe that American models are safer in that context. Fighting their client about that demand is really hard given the really sensitive work that they deal with.

2. Their system actually makes it so from my understanding that even the employes couldn't access the private data itself or have some really hard lockdowns. They use some sort of service provided by Azure for that with GPT models.

IMO, the thing that they were worried about were more the deprecation of previous models and they reluctantly have to switch models and the models censorship which is a real pressing concern for them

The previous gpt model that they were on (I think 4o/5 I am not sure) was more willing to answer their questions. The recent models are more like "let me stop you just right there" and other censorship.

With models switching and being forced to change to models which aren't as effective for use cases, a point comes where they might change from it altogether into open-weights model hosted on nearby servers, but I think that they are waiting to see how things pan out really

They need a new acronym: AGI -> ASI -> Artificial Mega Intelligence AMI? Maybe go back to AGI but make it mean Artificial Godlike Intelligence?

It's too bad Altman already blew his wad with the whole Dyson sphere thing. It's hard to top that. Maybe he can promise them a paperclip universe? That's gotta be worth a few more trillion.

Call it "Roko's Modern Life"

[dead]

Agree, though there’s something to be said about many engineers dragging their feet hard on AI, and now very few are. Some of that is forcing them to try and learn how to use it.

There's very little that wasn't possible before LLMs, because, well, you still had humans. There are many things that the models promise to make a lot cheaper, if you're willing to accept trade-offs, but these trade-offs can be quite severe.

Many of the most successful applications of LLMs are fields that were already terrible. For example, LLMs are a natural fit for customer support. And somehow, it's also a natural fit for software engineering, which I suppose is an indictment of our field... who cares if a model comes up with a bad architecture or a product that only kinda-works, that's how we always rolled.

It’s a forcing function. If you are running a company you need to be in control. Some engineers dngaf or will sandbag everything.

We did a 90 day push and identified where we found value and where we didn’t. Our tools teams really upped their game, more than expected, and it would have been unlikely to have been funded if they tried to justify the budget as an individual initiative.

There’s a spectrum of people - some folks are building rando apps for fun with LLMs, and many don’t really know what’s possible becuase they don’t or can’t invest in the subscription to really use the tools at home.

Yea, that tracks. I just looked it up and AWS made ~130bn.

Given how big AI is, and how those two are pretty much the only players (in comparison aws is 1/3 market share), that seems about right.

It's a far cry from "nobody's going to be writing any code, and ai will do all the things in 6 months".

What's the source for that? I see a combined revenue of ~33B by looking on the Internet. And we should assume that that's after some crazy financial juggling

Enron was doing really well with creative accounting too. Non-GAAP numbers are out of control in 2026. The unwinds are going to be stunning eventually. Also, my small portfolio is worth a billion! In Yen, but it’s still an accurate claim.

Source?

And yet two orders of magnitude from making a profit…

What are you doing if you might share ? Edit: 10x sounds like a lot so I wonder which work you do to achieve such a multiple with a simple 40€ subscription.

Same experience. There was a period where Claude was burning through it's limits very quickly (~2 months ago?), but other than that, the $20/month plan is enough to do loads of work+personal coding. I am curious what workflows people are using that requires the expensive plans, and what they're building/maintaining.

Are you making 10x more income for yourself?

> so I can buy a hard drive again

Well, that is unless the burst also brings a general collapse. Some are seeing similarities with 2008.