alt Hacker NewsCurrently it costs so much more to host an open model than it costs to subscribe to a much better hosted model. Which suggests it’s being massively subsidised still.
Replies
ericd • today at 1:32 PM
Efficiency goes way up with concurrent requests, so not necessarily subsidy, could just be economy of scale.
JumpCrisscross • today at 11:10 AM
If I drop $10k on a souped-up Mac Studio, can that run a competent open-source model for OpenClaw?
stingraycharles • today at 10:32 AM
You can use open models through OpenRouter, but if you want good open models they’re actually pretty expensive fairly quickly as well.
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For a lot of tasks smaller models work fine, though. Nowadays the problem is less model quality/speed, but more that it's a bit annoying to mix it in one workflow, with easy switching.
I'm currently making an effort to switch to local for stuff that can be local - initially stand alone tasks, longer term a nice harness for mixing. One example would be OCR/image description - I have hooks from dired to throw an image to local translategemma 27b which extracts the text, translates it to english, as necessary, adds a picture description, and - if it feels like - extra context. Works perfectly fine on my macbook.
Another example would be generating documentation - local qwen3 coder with a 256k context window does a great job at going through a codebase to check what is and isn't documented, and prepare a draft. I still replace pretty much all of the text - but it's good at collecting the technical details.