Comment by zmmmmm
3 days ago
Listen - that's the sound of millions of companies and users doubling down on Chinese models.
It might be a national security problem for other nations to have access to these models. But it's equally now a national security problem for any other nation to depend on them. Or US tech in general.
As it happens, the current number-two article on HN is about a similar consequence of Chinese export controls--a car manufacturer developing electric motors that do not use rare earths:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48510010
The incentives around OSS become stronger the further down in the list of market leaders a company is. The #1 company has no particular incentive to push open software apart from a belief that the market is going to be come commoditised anyway. But the 2nd or 3rd largest player has actual incentives to break the market up and remove software quality as a consideration. No #10 may as well not bother with a proprietary option since if they make it a software quality battle they're going to lose each customer 9 times anyway.
Just because the Chinese are running export controls in one market doesn't mean that they're going to close of access to AI. They might, but each market should be considered in isolation.
Realpolitik in action. Great powers just impose export controls because they know they can and they think it would be beneficial to the nation.
And it is nearly always hubris - the people making these decisions are surrounded by yes-men who built their whole career pumping up the egos of their superiors.
This has never been a winning move, yet it became increasingly popular in the last decade.
Yeah because they’re just using electromagnets. Those motors are not better than the rare earth ones.
> Listen - that's the sound of millions of companies and users doubling down on Chinese models.
They’re falling back to Opus 4.8. Most people weren’t using Fable for everything anyway because it’s so expensive.
None of open weights models are even at Opus 4.8 levels. If someone was using Fable they don’t have any second best alternative outside of Anthropic.
A sample of one, but I was getting more stuff done despite Fable uses tokens twice as fast as Opus, because it understood the goals so well and worked to achieve them.
Same experience. Wouldn't waste my tokens on easy stuff for it. It blasted through some of my toughest problems and produced some truly great code.
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> more stuff done
More stuff done per dollar or more stuff done for more dollars? Seems to be an important distinction
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Same, I was actually having interesting thought experiments with Fable.
I even upgraded my Max plan because Fable was doing so well.
Same here, now n=2.
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Yep. I love open source but there isn’t a model that comes close still to the closed source options like Opus 4.8 and that’s obvious from most people I see across the software industry as well. There are at least another few models after Opus from OpenAI and Anthropic most would go down the list using before any of the Chinese models at this point.
I could really use something that can just refactor a few classes and create DTOs from entities.
Opus 4.8 has taken such a beating over the last couple of days since the release of fable, videos online of people referring to it like the “redheaded stepchild” (is there a better way of saying this, this sounds racist) basically at this point, everyone is going to be seriously disappointed to fall back to that.
> is there a better way of saying this, this sounds racist
It's not racist or even politically incorrect in the US, it's a common saying.
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> Most people weren’t using Fable for everything anyway because it’s so expensive.
Or they were getting silently rerouted and couldn't realise they weren't using Fable
> If someone was using Fable they don’t have any second best alternative outside of Anthropic.
GPT-5.5 isn't awful.
As an European I'm happy to be convincing my clients from years to move out of any us dependencies.
It's tough, US technologies are everywhere but they are only liabilities. Microsoft is the stickiest of all.
Aren't biggest Qwen 3.7 closed? I don't suspect China's policy here would be anything but ruthless.
MiniMax M3 is surprisingly powerful, and open weight (or is about to be). There's others in this space too: MiMo v2.5, GLM 5.1. There's quite a few to pick from if you want strong models running on "your" hardware.
MiniMax M3 weights have already been released: https://huggingface.co/MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-M3
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US is well known to impose world wide embargoes on technologies and resources that they pretend to apply to companies beyond its borders.
And it works, because the American market is generally more important than the markets of these countries 9 times out of 10.
deepseek v4 pro is great and open weight.
It is, and I love it, but it isn't capable of performing the tasks I've been giving to Opus, let alone Fable.
Don't get me wrong, I use it, it's fast-smart-and affordable. But not suitable for all tasks.
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Fun fact, I was trying this afternoon Deepseek vs Opus 4.8 high, and I was surprised at how good Deepseek was. It outperformed Opus 4.8 on multiple occasions.
Found just later I was using v4 flash and not pro (for mistakenly setting the model to deepseek-chat and not v4-pro).
There are aspects about Deepseek I don't like though, when pushed against it will eagerly bend instead of reasoning and advocating for his points, something Opus 4.7 and later models started doing a lot (even when wrong).
All current Qwen 3.7 models are closed though they have said more releases are coming
Which models? Im curious what kind of more specific hypothesis you're willing to put forth. Anthropic going to lose 20-30-40-50% of users to Deepseek? What?
I quit paying for Claude Code to buy z.ai's coding plan for use with OpenCode. I'm not a power user, but I don't regret switching away from Claude. OpenCode is generally nicer for my work.
Why z.ai and not an ollama pro plan that can use all the open models? Real question, not snark. I've only ever done ollama and wonder what I'm missing.
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I guess if it works for you, great; that’s why competition is a good thing.
Enjoy.
Have never heard of it, thanks for the info
As a non-US person, I will use whatever is the best and reasonably priced. I could not give one iota about who makes or hosts these models. The origin or political leanings of these models mean nothing in my usage calculus.
Chinese models are next, the whole reason this is happening is because they don't want China to steal their tech. It is no secret anymore that they have been distilling US models. That's why it is explicitly aimed at foreign nationals.
You are drinking the cool aid if you think the CCP is going to let the world get ahead of China using CCP models.
They are?
They have pioneered and been very influential in different aspects of LLM engineering and research, while also publishing in the open.
You would not have Fable 5 as good as it is without Chinese work.
Do you mean Kool-Aid?
Banned Aid
Wait until it is illegal to download or use Chinese models (only half-joking).
Anthropic is explicitly lobbying for this.
Is there any SCOTUS precedent for this? It seems like a huge 1A issue for the government to limit self hosted access to a foreign country’s LLM.
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Know where I can read about that?
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Nothing funny about it. That's exactly what Amodei asks for, every time he rubs his monkey's paw.
They'll have to remove sections like this from their AI Action Plan
> We need to ensure America has leading open models founded on American values. Open- source and open-weight models could become global standards in some areas of business and in academic research worldwide. For that reason, they also have geostrategic value. While the decision of whether and how to release an open or closed model is fundamentally up to the developer, the Federal government should create a supportive environment for open models.
Unless they (gasp!) write some statement they don’t believe or don’t follow through with.
Anthropic hates open weight Chinese models so yes
Good thing these corrupt gerontocrats are also all in on cryptocurrency then.
US will ban American companies from using Chinese models and also ban them from dealing with companies who use Chinese models. “Code produced by Chinese models may be deliberately introduce backdoors and vulnerabilities” that kind of thing.
To do what? I mean they’re good models, but frankly, they fucking suck (relatively speaking). I’m not looking to going back to a week of back-and-forth with the LLM once I’ve gotten used to all this one shotting.
Not really, they are not even as good as opus 4.7
So, a few month difference... Definitely usable as far as we found, especially being so much cheaper.
yes, I am using mimo code(free version) for the last 2 days. I gets the job done for me.
If I need to upgrade, the plan start at $6, so its a no brainer.
No one serious is using the open models. Using them is like traveling back 2-2.5 years in time and using ChatGPT.
DeepSeekv4 Pro is roughly Opus 4.5 - Opus 4.6 in my estimation. That's about 8 months difference, not 2.5 years.
It's definitely not as good. But it's also definitely good enough.
Curious- in what tasks? I find Opus 4.5/4.6 too expensive and have tried to migrate to DeepSeek for C++ work, but found it couldn't cut it.
What's your DSv4 setup? What harness? It sounds like I should give it another try!
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