Yes, thanks for this, Deepseek! (I did start using the Deepseek harness and v4 flash due to the crazy low usage limits on sol and I'm quite pleased to have discovered how capable both of those are -- both have now earned a place in my agentic workflow).

I did try to use Chinese open models, but for my production work they simply couldn't cope at all; both GLM 5.3 and Deepseek v4 went into infinite loop and wasted my tokens until my OpenRouter wallet reached 0; good thing I didn't enable the auto topup. US models, by contrast, breezed past them.

Even for simpler tasks, Chinese models took long time to complete, and I needed to supervise closely. The price , in the end, didn't come cheap, mainly because too much time wasted on thinking.

So maybe one day Chinese models will squeeze out the American ones, but today is not that day.

As far as consumers are concerned, I feel blindly shilling for anyone purely for ideological reasons are quite meaningless, especially when it comes to open/close source and US/China rivalry. I have no obligation to support "open source/weight" or the "underdogs" just because they are so. We only want things that work, and at a cheap price.

So in other words, right now you have free choice between Claude and Codex and developers are choosing Claude of their own free will, but you want management to come in and force people to use Codex instead?

If it’s so much better, developers will switch. Lots of devs at my company have switched recently. But plenty of others have stayed on Claude.

I don’t think one is clearly better in every way right now. Or at least not better enough to make people want to learn and set up a new tool.

> But it seems Claude code is too strong of a brand

Nah. I switched away from Claude Code to Codex recently. It's refreshing how to-the-point 5.6-Sol is out of the box, and there's only so many load-bearing seams and honest takes I can handle from Opus. And additionally, yeah as you called out, the Codex Max plan is substantially more generous with tokens than Anthropic is with Claude Max and Opus/Fable.

I switch every 6-10 weeks, because there seems to be a material change in model quality.

I can understand the fatigue - but as of today, for most thing I would say Sol is better.

If the opened up the 1M context in Codex, it would be unrivalled.

Enterprise may have a bit more difficulty context switching. Pun intended.

I have tried both and I find the Claude models give me much better results. I wish they didn't since Codex is cheaper. For me it's not just branding.

If developers are choosing Claude when given unlimited access to both, then any executive who tries to force them to Codex is really stupid.

Claude really doesn't have that much market share. It's the most expensive by a mile but when you count token market share they're in the low %.

And everyone else is close enough in terms of quality, their tiny advantage if any is insufficient. Let's not even talk speed.

OpenAI is competing with chinese models.

Not sure if I do anything wrong but Codex with Sol made such slow progress on my work, I iterated several days to do a redesign of my UI and it kept making small piecemeal changes then stopping and asking me for confirmation again and again even though I tried to get it to get bigger chunks done. Switched to Claude Code and had the redesign done in a short session within a day.

Maybe just the system prompt or my settings or the harness? Anyway, it seemed to me Codex was just deliberately being overcareful and wasting tons of tokens for a low-risk CSS / HTML refactoring with very minor breakage risk, while Claude got the job done immediately.

What's the deal with anthropic? Their models aren't better. They're just multiple times more expensive. We're about to disable all anthropic models because of the colleagues who waste 15$ on a opus call to write a markdown file.

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I hope these type of dismissive comments stop in HN. OpenAI have been reducing prices since for ever so these kinda things are really the consequence of finding efficiencies and passing it down due to competition and increasing demand.

> without a better model in the wing ...

How do you know they don’t?

> is altman playing 4d chess or something I'm not aware of?

Anthropic just removed a discount on Fable, while people are simultaneously getting sick of reading fable and opus talking about “the load bearing texture” and “color of the blanket”. It’s become excruciatingly painful to read the output during coding sessions.

Maybe it’s just good marketing.

Their margins are already quite high and this is a play to bleed customers from Anthropic, they will of course raise prices after IPO.

> without a better model in the wing

I believe Astra is the next model beyond Sol? They used it for https://openai.com/index/ten-advances-in-mathematics/

My personal best case scenario is that LLMs are commodotizing and that the "We'll rule the world with our frontier models" vision of OpenAI and Anthropic is not working out.

They can and probably will still be very successful but what they pitched so far is not going to work if their is any meaningful competition not too far behind.

But who knows. VC money allows them to try a lot of stuff before their eventual IPO.

It seems that they lack a holistic strategy. All these decisions probably make sense in isolation but together they create a huge mess.

Given the increased pressure from open weight models (still 6 months behind but now more than good enough for most use cases) the frontier labs really have to step up their game.

Switching is as easy as typing /model in most harnesses so there's effectively zero moat.

Or maybe… you know.. their margins are that high and by passing down the efficiency gains to consumer they can get market share and induce more demand?

What’s 4d chess in this?

“GPT-5.6 Sol is available at promotional pricing, 50% off standard rates, through September 3, 2026. The default tier is $2.00 per 1M input tokens, $0.20 per 1M cached input tokens, $2.50 per 1M cache write tokens, and $10.00 per 1M output tokens. The long context tier is $4.00 per 1M input tokens, $0.40 per 1M cached input tokens, $5.00 per 1M cache write tokens, and $15.00 per 1M output tokens.”

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they were only able to make Sol more efficient on the API plan, but couldnt figure out how to recreate those efficiency gains on the consumer plan

Their X post[1] indicated that they've been trying to combat reselling subscription plans via token API gateways and at the same time many, many people, myself included, have seen a drastic drop in available weekly capacity for the same amount of queries/tokens, all else being equal. So they may be trying to make subscriptions and API access more equal to each other from both ends.

1. https://xcancel.com/thsottiaux/status/2090675027670978569#m

Nope.

The margin is defined as (price-cost of goods)/(price); the highest it can be is 100%.

Are LLM companies proven to be profitable now?

Probably even higher because openai and anthropic undoubtably have the lowest cost per token generated, especially with cerebras being able to serve a million tokens every 16 minutes.

Does anyone know who/what hardware serves Deepseek official for US and EU customers? And where it is located?

Yeah, if they didn't buy up all the ram and ssd's, they would have imploded.. maybe they should have stayed public benefit/open after all...

Let me reword this for you: super cheap Asian frontier models can cause harm to your overpriced business model.

This is AI slop commenting.

It’s currently 50% off on OpenRouter even.

OpenRouter is already offering Sol at a 50% promotional discount. https://openrouter.ai/collections/discounted-models