For coding often quality at the margin is crucial even at a premium. It’s not the same as cranking out spam emails or HN posts at scale. This is why the marginal difference between your median engineer and your P99 engineer is comp is substantial, while the marginal comp difference between your median pick and packer vs your P99 pick and packer isn’t.

I’d also say it keeps the frontier shops competitive while costing R&D in the present is beneficial to them in forcing them to make a better and better product especially in value add space.

Finally, particularly for Anthropic, they are going for the more trustworthy shop. Even ali is hosting pay frontier models for service revenue, but if you’re not a Chinese shop, would you really host your production code development workload on a Chinese hosted provider? OpenAI is sketchy enough but even there I have a marginal confidence they aren’t just wholesale mining data for trade secrets - even if they are using it for model training. Anthropic I slightly trust more. Hence the premium. No one really believes at face value a Chinese hosted firm isn’t mass trolling every competitive advantage possible and handing back to the government and other cross competitive firms - even if they aren’t the historical precedent is so well established and known that everyone prices it in.

I use Opus and the Qwen models. The gap between them is much larger than the benchmark charts show.

If you want to compare to a hosted model, look toward the GLM hosted model. It’s closest to the big players right now. They were selling it at very low prices but have started raising the price recently.

If these results are because of vampire attacks, the results will stop being so good when closed ones figure out how to pollute them when they are sucking answers.

Also, they are not exactly as good when you use them in your daily flow; maybe for shallow reasoning but not for coding and more difficult stuff. Or at least I haven't found an open one as good as closed ones; I would love to, if you have some cool settings, please share

The token prices being high for Opus undermines your argument, because it shows people are willing to pay more for the model.

The thing is the new OpenAI/Anthropic models are noticeably better than open source. Open source is not unusable, but the frontier is definitely better and likely will remain so. With SWE time costing over $1/min, if a convo costs me $10 but saves me 10 minutes it's probably worth it. And with code, often the time saved by marginally better quality is significant.

> yet below than OpenAI/Anthropic

This is the competitive advantage. Being better.