This always felt like way to work around libel laws. Where they can claim "People on twitter are saying x", as an indirect way of making a claim without having to be liable for it.
This is true but it's completely negated when someone wastes my time asking them to review their AI slop wall of code, or when it actually goes live and blows up production.
The vagueness could be intentional. There’s been a big issue with linux where proof of concept exploit code gets posted before the bug is announced because people reverse engineer it from the fix commits.
Apple has the advantage that they can keep everything secret for long enough for the patches to roll out. And realistically there is no reason the user needs to know the details of an exploit that was patched before it was ever used.
Privacy is the main benefit of running it yourself. Sending all of your personal info to random providers on openrouter would worry me. I don't mind it for code but if it's connected to my calendar and personal data, I want it running on my machine.
I can't wait until good enough models can run on affordable hardware.
At least in Australia, anything outside common phone repairs goes in to the "not worth it" basket. I had a USB-C port snap of a microphone, PCB pads were still fine, just needs someone to use a hot air gun to attach a new port. Repair stores didn't want to touch it.
And I can see the logic. Wages are so high that anything that they can't exactly know the repair time and success rate can easily exceed the device value. While in lower income countries they can afford to mess around for quite a while on repairs since the replacement cost is relatively massive.
We can pay someone $20~60 an hour to stand in line for concert tickets and shoe drops but we can't get enough blue-collar workers to bring down housing prices.
NYC McDonald's pays $17~20 an hour...
Somewhere along the way, what we value for labor and what we work we are willing to do got very messed up.
I picture some rig you wear with a small ledge on ypur stomach, and a battery pack on your back, to power the soldering iron. I've wrapped a thin wire around my soldering tip to work on tiny pads, so I envision this plus magnifying eyewear too.
Sadly in the US the bomb squad would soon show and shoot your ass, but maybe you'd get a settlement out of it.
I had my lenovo laptop's last USB-C port bugger up. of course, lenovo themselves will repair this by replacing the mainboard (~1.5k+?).
so I did a search for anyone doing microsolder repairs nearby, picked the closest, and found someone who diagnosed, quoted, and then replaced both ports, and a chip that had vaporised itself along the way, for a couple hundred AUD.
I don't entirely understand why they "didn't want to touch it"? Surely they were capable of soldering a new port. I'm sure they'd have had to charge a lot. There's unlikely to be much difference in cost between the repair and a replacement microphone.
But why not offer that? All else being equal I'd rather fix something than put it in landfill and buy a new one. Am I the only one?
Tbh they didn’t even open it up. Just decided it was too hard and gave it back. I had to follow a YouTube tutorial to work out how to open it since stuff is designed to hide all visible entry points these days.
Had I handed it to them disassembled and asked them to just solder a port on they might have accepted.
Liability, and hassle. They have a few repairs they do regularly. Anything else is a risk and they don't need the money that badly. And they can't be 90% confident they'll get it right, since they don't do it regularly.
They also can’t charge if they can’t fix it. And they don’t know the extent of the damage beforehand. So they could waste an hour of labor before finding its unfixable.
In that time they could have done 3 iPhone battery replacements.
I've not blogged since the rise of AI started in earnest, but I intend to do just that: the prompt I used in a collapsed callout at the top, and the actual post body below. Yes, I'll do a ton of editing, but the prompt itself is close enough to a summary to be useful, and if someone is in a hurry it'll be the fastest way to get the gist.
Personally I've found Deepseek v4 Flash to be as useful to me as Opus. But I don't do these silly one shot tech demos. I have the technical understanding to ask for exactly the change I want with the right terminology. I loaded up some credit on openrouter and it took me ages to hit $1 in spend.
I’m the exact same way. $15 on openrouter lasted me so long it would’ve got me fired at FAANG. Despite this, my number of commits is dramatically higher. Small, beautifully scoped changes is just good software development, and good for the wallet as well.
I think the issue is that no one is content with incremental progress. We all know one shots are mostly possible, so the age of the personal project is kind of over. There’s no motive to invest dozens of hours getting a working prototype when Claude can give you something right now. So you can’t make small changes until you have that codebase in place already. You’re forced to make sweeping changes if you use AI from the beginning. And it’s not like it matters, there’s no personal attachment to any one part of the code, it’s not even seen!
I can see why Anthropic is freaking out right now. China has undermined their whole business. AI models will be basic commodities where hosting providers earn a tiny margin over the raw costs rather than the predicted fortunes from being the gatekeepers to the technology.
+1, and commodification was inevitable from the outset. This was the case before China. China hate is xenophobic and unproductive: produced both model improvements and desirable products people want at this moment in time. You use the best/cheapest model for the job/user input.
Parallels to the US auto industry not paying attention to its buyers and the right strategies when they lost technical dominance to other countries a few decades back.
Yeah I feel like China and their OSS model companies really did the world a great service by ensuring closed source US companies don't have an monopoly on LLMs and thus capture all the value of AI development and its impact on society. It's not going to be the foundational labs that will capture all the value -- I'm sure they will do just fine. A lot of it now will flow to the companies providing the inferences and since no one has any exclusive deals, those companies will have to compete and drive the price down, which ultimately benefits the rest of us.
It’s not a service, I hope nobody thinks this is being done ”for the good of humanity” or whatever. Doesn’t mean there’s not a benefit to people, but the financial politics behind it could turn out extremely good for China, and they are very well aware of just that.
Do American companies think about the "financial politics" of their decisions? I somehow really doubt it. Government takes sides and sometimes applies leverage to get companies to do what they want, but that's something separate from "it's a good business decision for Chinese labs to treat models as commodities". There's no need to think about geopolitics - American AI companies could easily take the same approach as the Chinese, but they all want to get exciting and huge VC cash rather than boring and less lucrative Compute-as-a-Service money.
American labs are also funded by the US government. Are they equivalent to the US state? Do Chinese and US labs/researchers exist solely in the international sphere, without any domestic concerns or individual aspirations? The Chinese have a different culture and political system than Americans, but it's not like they're ants without free will or the ability to think. I highly doubt that DeepSeek is operating solely at the behest of the CPC or that they are in business to take down the US rather than to make money.
I think this is a false dichotomy between benevolence and China secretly plotting and puppeteering everything to some grand self serving scheme. Reality is probably a lot simpler and has little to do with either. In China there's intense domestic competition in most industries, including LLMs.
Going open weights is an easy way to gain mindshare in this sort of environment, which is exactly why Meta also went open weight. The difference is that in China you had leading models going open weight which puts a lot of downward pressure on other orgs to do the exact same. I doubt China's grand vision extends beyond achieving the best system possible, and fostering a highly competitive environment is exactly how you achieve that.
The fact that open weight frontier models may also cause the investment bubble in the US to burst is likely incidental. AI funding is a bubble, and it's going to burst. The exact final cause is again mostly just incidental. The economic damage this will cause in the US will also cause substantial downstream damage to China as well, and they generally aren't so big on the whole punch yourself in the face because you don't like another country, that has become trendy in the West. So the idea of a secret economic attack doesn't even make much sense. In the status quo China wins, so they don't even have any motivation to cause chaos.
You gotta remember there are people working at these companies with their own motivations, beliefs, and values. And to the extent that their government allows them to, they will act on those.
I think the people in the Chinese labs have a different set of motivations, beliefs, and values that make them more amenable to sharing AI as a common good rather than some economical advantage. I've heard that workers in the Chinese labs share far more knowledge between themselves, and the narrative around AI in China is different from what we see in the USA. So it is possible, I believe, that the labs are to some extent releasing open models "for the good of humanity", or at least they believe it is the right thing to do.
Their business model always seemed to be "become IBM, gods of the mainframe and server-side-computing" and that always seemed a bit unlikely to last forever considering how thoroughly the PC disrupted that by being "good enough" without the lock-in.
IMO because they speed-ran it so much (raising orders of magnitudes more, pushing out new stuff orders of magnitudes faster) it will also lead to the rest of the world catching up faster and shrinking the pool of people internal to them who continually benefit compared to what actually went on with IBM. There's only so much upside when you join a company with hundreds-of-billions valuation.
I guess the other part of their business plan bet was "become literal god of AGI". Maybe it'll still happen!
the writing should have been on the wall when meta did it with llama. it was very apparent that one or two entities could release a "good enough" product into the wild commoditizing the frontier of yesterday.
We intentionally use both Codex and Claude on our team so that we can compare and contrast. We are reasonably serious about delivering work that has been reviewed and tested with humans who are at a minimum steering that process, at maximum doing it the good old fashioned way. I feel like the Claude guy tends to overproduce, like it just loves to go beyond the spec, add embellishments we didn't ask for, all this generates a ton more code which may or may not be necessary, and in certain areas of the product like UX this may be fine but in sensitive business logic it's a hard no, we need to throw it out and rewrite. I see much less of this with Codex and I look forward to trying an open model when we have time. Personally my Claude subscription is languishing, I won't say it has zero uses but as a relative Claude latecomer I just feel like the style it produces is just not what I'm looking for.
Claude feels more like gambling, that's what it is. Built for the vibe coder.
I found Mimo 2.5 Pro to be the right balance between cost and intelligence. It costs the same as DeepSeek v4 Pro, but it's better overall by a small margin.
Do you use DeepSeek for both planning and building or do you have a preferred builder? I've been looking into moving from Cursor to OpenCode, or at least have Opencode for when my allocated usage for the month is done.
I use Claude at work; provided by my employer. I pay DeepSeek on a personal capacity.
I honestly have a better experience using DeepSeek, in part because since the cost is lower I feel more free to experiment with it. But in part because the model is excellent, and can handle everything I throw at it in a collaborative manner.
I am really excited for when V4 is out of preview and they are done with all the post-training bit.
I'm genuinely curious how you can do this - with limited context tokens, I find the output is often inconsistent with the project, or recreates functionality it missed, if I forget to point it at every pertinent object/library/etc it will need.
Tbh I have only used it on small personal projects and some open source stuff so I haven’t done any crazy stress tests or benchmarks. But for my use case it was great.
It's fine as a kind of replacement for forums, but I don't like it at all for chat and community. I find Discord admins always tend to create 5 trillion channels which each get about one message per week. And then whine when you haven't sorted your messages in to the most relevant channels.
The vast majority of chats would be be better off in a standard group chat UI with no channels.
I think there is some logic in delaying the rollout, giving it to the heads of the largest software products first to fix their code before dumping it on the general public. But yes eventually everyone will have this tech and it won't matter because the low hanging fruit will have all been picked clean.
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