alt Hacker NewsDS isn't better than Sol and Gemini in the benchmarks, but after working with them all for a while now I'm beginning to understand why people find DS _feels_ so much better.
First, it's the tok/s and TTFT from providers. Deepseek blazes through work - at quite good quality - and you don't find yourself waiting for your agents to finish.
Second is the openness. Being able to see the CoT and not being randomly blocked for cyber review. You're never wondering if it's stuck or if it will randomly fail. Combined with the great cost value.. My next subscription will probably be Z.ai
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Agreed.
It doesn’t have to be better, it just had to be nearly equivalent. I’ve been doing a lot of vulnerability work lately (trying to get ahead of the bots finding exploits in our code) and the frontier models feel like a chaperone at a church dance: get too close and they show up with the ruler and enforce the safety margin. Using deepseek and glm and qwen, I’ve gotten nearly equivalent results without the constraints. I still use frontier models for things but outside of a company environment, I’m happy to spend 1/10 the money, get the same results, and not have try and trick the AI into working.
I do not use DS for coding, but for various natural language processing tasks (even translation) in large volume, and it works wonder.
It is very capable for a lot of tasks, not only coding like the other open models.
No need to use a chinese provider, in case that's an issue for you. https://fireworks.ai provides this model for an ok price.
Agreed, but don’t subscribe to z.ai; their inference is terrible. Stick with openrouter
Is that a dig on DeepSeek not offering subscription plans?
If so OpenCode Go looks good and includes DeepSeek models (yet to try myself).
> not being randomly blocked for cyber review
Just to test, will GLM – hosted by an infra provider other than Z.AI – also stop answering if I asked controversial questions from the pov of its country of origin? Or third party infra providers can perform some unhinging on the model before hosting? Or actually the blocking happens even before the question reaches the LLMs in that country?
(Note: my paid LLM access at this point are only via DS and GLM subs - 90-95% usage; and a free Gemini Pro access. I hope that adds some cred that I am not trying to take potshots at the their country of origin).
Deepseek and Muse are my go to for cheap. both work perfect for basic and mid tier tasks
I love using glm 5.3 more than deepseek because of performance
> Deepseek... My next subscription will probably be Z.ai
Wait wut? You do realize that they are two different companies, right?
still a myracle to me what people achieve with it? I tried so many things with it, everything is broken it produces
Huh, doesn't DeepSeek take the longest because it overthinks way too much? Haven't tested this release yet but was very disappointed with past ones because it takes an eternity to do anything because it constantly overthinks and questions itself way too much instead of just starting.
Feels better to me in the sense that it doesn't try to be too clever. When I ask it to do things it actually generates code that a developer would write. That still lets me build software in layers like I do mentally. And it keeps you in control of where abstractions are.
Some people would say that you don't need this at all with the frontier llms. But when extending existing software or writing software that fits into an existing ecosystem, I find I still need to offer a lot of guidance. And it's better that the context window isn't flooded with code that was reverted after I looked at it.