alt Hacker NewsEven if you don't want to use open models, you should cheer for them anyway because it puts the American frontier labs' feet to the flames. This competition is awesome for us consumers.
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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.
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).