How do you reconcile these ideas with the fact that cheap open weight models are only slightly behind the state of the art?

If anything, I would bet that next year you could get today’s flagship performance for significantly cheaper via an open-weights model.

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LurusCode 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You can easily develop with models like GLM 5.1 and Kimi k2.6 at a fraction of the cost of GPT 5.5 or Opus 4.7. Requests often cost just a few cents.

Open-source models have caught up tremendously recently. Those who can’t or don’t want to invest a lot of money can already develop with Kimi and GLM without any problems. We don’t have to wait another year for that.

	▲	GrinningFool 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Tried deepseek 4 w/ CC yesterday, and was watch my usage eke up by only 0.01 at a time while doing plenty of high-token-count tasks. I understand it's currently at a discount, but even after that expires the same-quality output will be available at a fraction of the cost of the expensive models. From experience, the same level of usage would have left me stranded on my CC 5 hr limit within an hour. There were some difficulties with tool calls, in particular with replacing tab-indented strings - but taking no steps to mitigate that (which meant the model had to figure it out every time I cleared context) only cost relatively few extra tokens -- and it still came in well under 4.6, nevermind 4.7. And of course, I can add instructions to prevent churning on those issues. I have no reason to go back to anthropic models with these results. "No moat" indeed.

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duskdozer 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

By that time, the hypebeasts will be explaining how worthless the models of today always were.

	▲	user34283 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		And there’s some truth to it. I expect tomorrow’s models will be so much more capable that we will happily pay more. But if not, we will still likely get today’s capabilities or more for cheap. I don’t see a realistic scenario in which the AI genie is going back into the bottle because of affordability. It seems like wishful thinking by people who dislike the new paradigm in software engineering.

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wartywhoa23 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Sure, but there will always be some monstrosities like Mythos that'll pwn all software written by local models in 0.01 seconds, thus forcing people/companies to use the most advanced paid models to keep up and stay unpwned for 1 second longer.

(Timeframes are hyperbolical).