Nvidia is providing free API to try Minimax M2.7
After logging into my shiny new Nvidia account, I'm presented with a banner saying "contact support to verify your account at help@build.nvidia.com".
I've contacted Nvidia support and haven't heard back. But they did send me a newsletter...
"free" does not mean what you think it means.
To Downvoters: I hope you have read the NVIDIA API Trial Terms of Service [0] before signing up. It clearly has restrictions and limitations.
From [0]:
> Unless you purchase a Subscription from NVIDIA or a Service Provider (as applicable), you may only use the API Service for internal testing and evaluation purposes, not in production. The terms and conditions of your Subscription will govern your production use of the API Service.
[0] https://assets.ngc.nvidia.com/products/api-catalog/legal/NVI...
That difference is actually pretty surprising. Is Claude that much more expensive to host? The end-user pricing seems to be pretty similar, or better for OpenAI.
The most important advantage of using open weights models is to have perfectly predictable performances and costs in the future. When you can run the model on your own hardware you are protected from price increases, subscription limits decreases or quality reductions of the provided models, like it has already happened for the users of Claude Code.
The disadvantage is that if you also want a high speed, you need more expensive hardware. You may defer the cost of buying better hardware, if you use an external provider for now, but you keep in reserve the possibility of hosting yourself the models that you are using, if anything makes the external providers worse.