Comment by wolttam
10 days ago
If you have no need for Anthropic/OpenAI's frontier model capability, you may be better served with an open-weight model that can't be taken away.
Edit:
> GPT-5 does the job.
I bring up DeepSeek V4 Flash a lot on HN, but I want to mention that according to Artificial Analysis, it trades blows with GPT-5 (high) (from August, 2025) [0]
[0]: https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/comparisons/deepseek-v4...
We rolled out Deepseek V4 Flash to our customers and it was an absolute disaster, unfortunately. It was not able to follow simple commands, always "forgot" to do things, lied consistently about its work, and so on. It was pretty good though on on-off work, like summarizing something or executing simple commands, so we are experimenting now with using it for subagent work with clear instructions and hand off.
Deepseek V4 Pro on the other hand is a really really good main driver and we have a lot of success using it. Its not Opus or GPT-5.5 level but on its way. Kimi 2.6 as well btw.. so there is already quite some choice.
Your experience with DeepSeek v4 Flash differs from mine: while I usually use DeepSeek v4 Pro (that is also inexpensive), I find using DeepSeek v4 Flash with the Fireworks.ai API and properly configured OpenCode to be very good for routine work, and it is pleasantly very fast. Admittedly I use DeepSeek v4 Pro for difficult problems.
I encourage people to at least once a month to do a quick evaluation with their own problems and workflows. Estimate cost as both what inference tokens cost for a task and also how much human effort it takes to get required results.
I disregard benchmarks.
We are also using fireworks as our model provider. Our harness is openClaw, so tasks are not only coding but all kinds of tasks. For instance, I asked to fetch some info from the web via Chrome browser and to collect the info in an MD. The MD never appeared, even though it claimed to. I asked it three times to write the MD and it was always: “oh yes, I do it now..” then nothing. The search itself also was very bad because it just gave up after one page and hallucinated an answer and - even worse :-) - told me it was very thorough…
Pro aced the task :-)
But maybe its a config issue.
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I found Flash to be a bit shaky as well until I started using it in xhigh/max thinking effort, then it became my daily driver. It runs quite well on a couple of DGX Sparks.
I still wish it was a little better, but there's hope for another model checkpoint (maybe with some of GLM 5.2's goodness distilled into it, that would be nice).
> I found Flash to be a bit shaky as well until I started using it in xhigh/max thinking effort
This is true for most of the open weight chinese models, to be fair. They're really built around long reasoning chains.
Also you're making me want a second Spark-alike :') but they're so expensive...
deepseek has no part of their privacy policy on their API about training. They are 100% training on every single word you give it.
If your customers are fine with that, your IP is not interesting, then you can use it.
Though with open models you have a lot of choice where to get it from. I see like ~15 providers here with various logging/ZDR policies, so pick whatever mix of price to features you want:
https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash
I don't believe a single word from AI companies, no matter where they are from. Sourcing their training data is run like genuine criminal enterprises - last year Anthropic settled for 1.5 billion, and and if they settled so quickly it might mean what we would see in court is even worse.
You don’t have to access Deepseek through Deepseek. You can self-host it and your data never leaves your premises.
I self-host Flash actually, but yeah.
When I use their API I use it knowing that they probably train on the data, and knowing that it's probably used to improve future iterations of their models.
But I use their API extremely rarely lately, because local Flash is good enough for me the vast majority of the time
And you’ve opened wireshark and verified the model is sending absolutely nothing? Not caching and sending later, etc?
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You can use deepseek through opencode, which says its providers have a no-retention policy.
They frustratingly don't tell you who the providers are.
DeepSeek V4 Pro is only ~3-4x as expensive as Flash. It won't replace GPT-5.5 (nowhere near) but I've been using the $20 sub to punch through tough cases and use Pro for rest.
It’s my daily driver in opencode
Deepseek V4 flash is actually useless. Sorry I've tested it after seeing so many comments like these. On Open router when trying to get it to output tool calls for creating tables, instead of providing the structured output correctly it was sending me peoples dropbox links and other image sharing site urls that led to pictures of random tables...
Llms seem to only impress a certain type of person. Hint, this type of person also was really excited about NFTs.
Unless you are hosting it yourself on your own infrastructure it absolutely can be taken away.
For all intents and purposes you'll be able to move an open weight model wherever you want.
I really dislike this rhetoric, you sound like the FSF guys who are like "you're not free until you're running coreboot with zero binary blobs". Sure they have a point but also, most people are fine running regular linux.
Reading your comment made me realize that I love that the position of the FSF is held by someone, in the interest of stretching the Overton Window to that side.
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Most FSF guys actually have very nuanced views on the topic and you’re doing everyone a disservice by reducing it to an extremist sound bite.
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Unless the US Gov bans inference companies from serving Chinese models to US customers...
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Still, with the same model being served by multiple providers, it is much less likely to disappear entirely, even if you would like to keep using a cloud provider. Worst-case scenario, you change providers. Or you use OpenRouter as a proxy.
There is actual market competition to host open models. If one provider stops offering a model you likely can find another provider that will
But you have multiple providers, not just one.
And every single one of those providers would buckle under government pressure.
Fable itself is hosted on all major cloud providers. How many offer it today?
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I'm sure he's referring to the tightening of internet controls around social media as an extrapolation to controlling websites, etc.
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No. As long as you downloaded the weights, you can run them somewhere.
Popular open models on Openrouter have dozens of providers.
No it can't you can take it where ever you want. It is yours not theirs.
>Unless you're running Linux yourself, it can absolutely be taken away.
Yes. The difference is obviously that full, fat Linux runs on a superset of anything a layperson would call a computer, and can be built from source on roughly the same set of hardware. Running the full, fat Deepseek (as in the 1.6T model, unquantized) is too big to run on anything a layperson would call a computer, and being able to actually build it is even harder.
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I just want personal agency
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