I suspect with the prices going up, that realization is going to be pretty appealing.
As some of us have been predicting, model capability had already mostly plateaued, and the Chinese have and will continue to relentlessly push cost down. Chinese models will be used for 95% of things, with nation-native models for security/sovereignity-sensitive workloads. Eventually (5+ years from now), efficiency gains and hardware progress will make running local models the dominant way of doing things.
And yes, that puts the investors of Claude and OpenAI in quite a pickle.
What started as all-you-can-eat $50 buffet has quietly become a $6k bill, frontier models that don’t ship your codebase to Beijing don’t come cheap anymore.
> that don’t ship your codebase to Beijing
DeepSeek is open weight, open source.
Sure, but I can't currently afford the hardware to run the frontier model.
It be great if more people drop good open models. But either way stuff like this is the future.
It feels like nobody is even trying to iterate on the "power-tool style" usage of language models, everyone jumped straight to agents. It's not clear to me that removing a human from the loop is strictly more efficient though. Imagine an editor with an embedded language model (either running locally or using cheap cloud models) that is constantly churning, analysing code, reading debug logs, offering suggestions. Refactoring is not b̴e̴g̴g̴i̴n̴g̴ asking a chat interface to make changes, but structured refactors utilising the language models powered by the underlying ast representations to pull off much larger or involved refactors that surpass the abilities of current IDEs. Or doing codegen in your editor in a more structured (and thus repeatable) way compared to an agent spitting out code that you have to then review.