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Comment by monster_truck | Hacker News Reader

Something I don't think many have internalized is that China has been as good or better for quite a while now (long before anyone was pointing distillation fingers) and enough people have finally tried it for themselves that the understanding has reached critical mass and the careful narrative of american companies is collapsing.

When I finally put $15 into Deepseek and it beat the brakes off Codex 5.5 on multiple rather complex projects without any of the obnoxious mistakes, I was sick to my stomach with buyers remorse. I couldn't believe I ever felt like I was getting my moneys worth at $200/mo. I wouldn't even use OAI's models if they were free and unlimited at this point, I'll happily pay for what I already know works. No reset bingo, no cache errors, no annoying shitposters as a primary source of info. Oh, and I still had $10 of tokens left

And yes, 3.6 is excellent locally. The rest of this year is gonna be awesome

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Opus 5 and 5.6 Sol are definitely not smart enough to do my job. They require constant supervision. So why would I want to switch to even worse model? Even if it's just slightly worse?

>So why would I want to switch to even worse model?

There would be no reason to if you are in the privileged position where cost isn't an issue.

For the rest of us something that's 95% as good for 20% the price is a hell of a value proposition.

That's why every benchmark should show the Pareto frontier against cost and latency.

Pareto optimal dominant vs a human for the same task, not an unreasonable framing but that assumes that it can actually do the task, which the op was arguing it couldn’t at all. Which, I suppose you could model as the utility of task completion % as being non linear. I have heard many people argue that the nature of work is messy and complicated and many things they do could not easily be emulated or automated. I do wonder how many of those activities are actually something that are connected to a companies ability to generate revenue or are just the messy interactions between people.

Cost is absolutely an issue here - my time is worth approximately $1000/day, so if a slightly worse model wastes one more hour of my time a day than the best model, it costs the company >$2k/mo. Fortunately my employer understands this well and encourages me to use the best models as much as I can.

This reply must have cost dozens of dollars.

This must be the new linked in strat. What I learned about using the best model after talking to a homeless person.

Imagine how much it must have cost to have him read your comment! I hope he sends you an invoice.

That’s the thing, the difference is so small that you won’t be wasting an hour per day with a model that’s 95% as good. In fact, you’d notice zero difference most of the days and when you do, maybe it’s an extra 30 minutes.

And the price difference is far greater than $2k/month once the API cost is no longer subsidized.

Would your employer be paying an extra $20k/month to Anthropic if it can save you 2 hours a month?

Imagine if we had this attitude for electricity. No point building a grid, just give it to a few factories that need all day lighting.

> So why would I want to switch to even worse model? Even if it's just slightly worse?

Self-hosting is the biggest reason.

If they already require your constant supervision the reason is money.

> They require constant supervision

I think that may be part of it.

LLMs can be autonomous to an extent. All of them need steering - which is why I feel they are more a superpower the more I am an expert on the subject matter.

The more you want it to be autonomous, than yeah, you may benefit from using the very best the industry has to offer, however slightly better it is.

But if you are always in the loop anyway, you may want to try DeepSeek. You will get similar results for a fraction of the price.

you seem to be mistaken, Opus and Sol are the worse models.

Stop trying to treat these things like a replacement for yourself and instead approach them as a limitless number of offshore developers. If you are willing to be endearingly literal they will make you happy

I think americans assume when they see a chinese or asian person working at an american business that they "escaped" china as opposed to just being rich enough to go to school abroad. and has little to no bearing on the amount of intelligent going around.

They've been continuously programmed with insane beliefs about China, which is less shocking when you understand what insane beliefs that they've had programmed into them about their neighbors. The world and your neighborhood are full of evil communists and Nazis who are trying to kill you all the time.

I don't think it's all Americans however there is a portion of them who are not able to grasp the world outside of their borders.

I think it's mainly due to poor education many receive and a very controlled media that suppresses information.

It's shocking considering how much money they spend on education compared to other nations.

> The world and your neighborhood are full of evil communists and Nazis who are trying to kill you all the time.

Don't know about that but your neighbors in Iran in early january happened to be "nice people" who just followed the orders to slaughter 30 000 unarmed civilians.

We could talk about the, what 600 000 deaths, including many civilians, in the Ukraine/Russia war.

Or we could talk about the number of nice palestinians killed since the beginning of the war in Gaza. Or we could go a bit further and talk about the joy and celebration in Gaza after their heroes brought back 200 hostages after having slaughtered 1200 civilians.

You may be living in a place that you think shields you from those but I know the ideologies behind these acts.

The fallacy of gray is just that: it's not true that there's always a nice middle ground and that there's no evil ideology out there.

Something something about the price of liberty being eternal vigilance. For there are people abusing your blind trust.

QED

If Americans see an Asian person working at a US business, they will assume that person is an American. They may even ask what state you are from. It's honestly one of the nice things about the place, you can belong even if you are not from there.

I will just assume they are American, unless they are an uber driver. Some cities in China very much are losers of the new tech plan. Otherwise why would they fly to mexico and cross the border

+1 most people are too afraid to try something new. They've been roughly on par with their frontier offerings for 6 months if not more.

And I had the opposite experience. It's a really interesting phenomenon that I can't really explain. My co-founder swears by Deepseek and yet just the other day we were conversing and he was telling me about some of the issues with the way the AI was behaving and trying to show off the cool workarounds he came up with to limit it. I was like, "Interesting, yeah, I've literally never had that problem."

I suspect that the models are genuinely close and that certain experiences get felt across providers but are inconsistent enough to convince people one is superior to the other. I for one have tried Deepseek on and off since my co-founder is fond of it and I've stopped trying now because I never have a good experience.

That’s not surprising. I have been using Deepseek and it consistently produces excellent output given the right context howevwr. It depends on the task as it does have blindspots.

That may be true.

I switched to DeepSeek entirely once I decided to put 10 bucks on it and I realized that it could do whatever I was throwing at Claude or ChatGPT prior to that.

I recommended it to one of my friends, and he was surprised DeepSeek could solve task that Claude got stuck at. I was surprised at it too.

I know others that tried and were less impressed too.

{Black box} + {sunk financial/time cost} + {ambiguous rankings} + {marketing} = {irrational tribal loyalty}

On reddit et al., people talk about LLM brands like their sports teams.

I think the first-party ecosystem moats they're all trying to build are exacerbating this tendency, as now people have a lot of learning time sunk in a company-specific option.

Yeah DeepSeek has always been terrible until the new release version of 4.

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