logoalt Hacker News

nullbiotoday at 4:31 PM3 repliesview on HN

Where are the model stats? Is this open-weights? If not, why would I use this over DeepSeek Flash 4.1?

I think these competing labs need to realize that no one wants another closed-weight model provider... We aren't even happy with the two we have right now, and their days are entirely numbered. If DeepSeek 4.1 flash is really as good as it's benching, we're probably a month away from 1/3rd of users moving off the closed-weight models in favor of something they have more control over (or is cheaper).

The big labs love to release their new model and quantize after the first week. You don't have that problem using dirt cheap API rates on OpenRouter. DS 4.1 flash is also faster than fast mode Astra. OAI's subscription rates are good value, but now these new open-weight models are nearly as cheap on API usage rates. I honestly can't wait for the day we're not beholden to the two big labs anymore. No wonder there's so much fear pumping happening at the moment from Anthropic and their funded NGOs.


Replies

notfromheretoday at 5:15 PM

This really just exists so cognition can stop spending API tokens with Anthropic or OpenAI.

Basically any successful AI based service will do this because at scale the frontier models are expensive and you’ll have enough data to fine tune your own.

Same reason Harvey is doing models now and basically every other provider

show 1 reply
erutoday at 4:51 PM

> If DeepSeek 4.1 flash is really as good as it's benching, we're probably a month away from 1/3rd of users moving off the closed-weight models in favor of something they have more control over (or is cheaper).

Only in the world where the incumbents don't react. Eg if they saw lots of users moving away, they'd drop prices or do something else.

show 2 replies
pizza234today at 5:17 PM

> we're probably a month away from 1/3rd of users moving off the closed-weight models in favor of something they have more control over (or is cheaper).

DS 4 Flash requires large amounts of memory to run at reasonable quants (I think a system with 160 GB or so). DS 4.1 Flash is even larger, I think around 250 GB.

Any DS version is dumb when compared (in realworld tasks) to Astra/Opus 5, which means, one would spend thousands of dollars, and still need to rely on cloud services to do jobs that are non trivial.