The incentives around OSS become stronger the further down in the list of market leaders a company is. The #1 company has no particular incentive to push open software apart from a belief that the market is going to be come commoditised anyway. But the 2nd or 3rd largest player has actual incentives to break the market up and remove software quality as a consideration. No #10 may as well not bother with a proprietary option since if they make it a software quality battle they're going to lose each customer 9 times anyway.

Just because the Chinese are running export controls in one market doesn't mean that they're going to close of access to AI. They might, but each market should be considered in isolation.

Realpolitik in action. Great powers just impose export controls because they know they can and they think it would be beneficial to the nation.

Yeah because they’re just using electromagnets. Those motors are not better than the rare earth ones.

A sample of one, but I was getting more stuff done despite Fable uses tokens twice as fast as Opus, because it understood the goals so well and worked to achieve them.

Yep. I love open source but there isn’t a model that comes close still to the closed source options like Opus 4.8 and that’s obvious from most people I see across the software industry as well. There are at least another few models after Opus from OpenAI and Anthropic most would go down the list using before any of the Chinese models at this point.

> Most people weren’t using Fable for everything anyway because it’s so expensive.

Or they were getting silently rerouted and couldn't realise they weren't using Fable

Opus 4.8 has taken such a beating over the last couple of days since the release of fable, videos online of people referring to it like the “redheaded stepchild” (is there a better way of saying this, this sounds racist) basically at this point, everyone is going to be seriously disappointed to fall back to that.

> If someone was using Fable they don’t have any second best alternative outside of Anthropic.

GPT-5.5 isn't awful.

I quit paying for Claude Code to buy z.ai's coding plan for use with OpenCode. I'm not a power user, but I don't regret switching away from Claude. OpenCode is generally nicer for my work.

MiniMax M3 is surprisingly powerful, and open weight (or is about to be). There's others in this space too: MiMo v2.5, GLM 5.1. There's quite a few to pick from if you want strong models running on "your" hardware.

deepseek v4 pro is great and open weight.

All current Qwen 3.7 models are closed though they have said more releases are coming

Anthropic is explicitly lobbying for this.

Anthropic hates open weight Chinese models so yes

Good thing these corrupt gerontocrats are also all in on cryptocurrency then.

Nothing funny about it. That's exactly what Amodei asks for, every time he rubs his monkey's paw.

They'll have to remove sections like this from their AI Action Plan

> We need to ensure America has leading open models founded on American values. Open- source and open-weight models could become global standards in some areas of business and in academic research worldwide. For that reason, they also have geostrategic value. While the decision of whether and how to release an open or closed model is fundamentally up to the developer, the Federal government should create a supportive environment for open models.

Do you mean Kool-Aid?

So, a few month difference... Definitely usable as far as we found, especially being so much cheaper.

DeepSeekv4 Pro is roughly Opus 4.5 - Opus 4.6 in my estimation. That's about 8 months difference, not 2.5 years.

It's definitely not as good. But it's also definitely good enough.