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Comment by gordonhart | Hacker News Reader

A new model comparable (ish) to the Claude/Gemini/GPT flagships is a big deal for the industry and for Meta even if it doesn't set the new frontier.

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I’m not sure. If it was open source, certainly. But 4th place doesn’t really matter if you have nothing different to add.

Fourth place means you're not reliant on any of the external providers for internal AI use, which is important for organizational health and negotiating with those other providers.

I’m not sure it’s useful for negotiating, the capex to build it was surely orders of magnitude more than it would cost to just use one of the other frontier models.

It’s like someone negotiating by saying, “I’ll waste even MORE money to build something worse if you don’t give me a deal.”

I’m not discounting there may be other advantages to doing it. I just don’t think negotiating is one.

If the model is truly on par with Opus 4.6/Gemini 3.1/GPT 5.4 (beyond benchmarks) this still puts MSL in the frontier lab category, which is no small feat given that they pretty much rebooted last year

Many labs aren't able to keep up with the frontier, xAI, Mistral

Why would you use this instead of the other more proven models? Unless it's significantly cheaper. The general population mostly wants it free, and the more professional users are willing to pay for good/better responses.

You wouldn't use this as an API. You would "use" this inside the meta properties. Have a shop on fb marketplace? Now you have copy, images, support, chat, translations, erp, esp, fps and all the other acronyms :) and so on for your mom and pop shop @200$/mo. Probably worse than say claude/gemini but it's right there, one button away. "Click here to upgrade to AI++" or something.

But rolling your own can’t be that much cheaper than buying it from a leading lab. Especially when you consider the amount of spending on datacenters.

leading labs are going to be tightening the screws. Otherwise why not just run the entire company on a public cloud?

I won't use it, but I'm excited to see it for the same reason why I'm excited to see a near-frontier open-source release: more competition pushes prices down and reduces monopoly/cartel risk. I won't use Muse or Grok or GLM at this point but they're good for the ecosystem.

Their new Contemplating mode gives this model a Deep Research ability (akin to existing models from GPT and Gemini) that might make it quite comparable to the just-announced Mythos.

Mythos is a much bigger pre train, Contemplating is not the same thing.

> Mythos is a much bigger pre train

Do we have data to substantiate that claim?

It's pretty common knowledge. Spud is the only other PT comparable with Mythos.

Both Spud and Mythos can also scale via inference time compute.

Meta simply did not have enough compute online, long enough ago, to have a similar PT.

> might make it quite comparable to the just-announced Mythos

Do we have data to substantiate that claim?

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