Comment by bestouff
2 days ago
Nowadays I don't understand why you wouldn't use a (more-or-less) nearby hosted Chinese model. You have the security, you have roughly the same performance, and you have an order of magnitude more bang for your buck. Bonus point : the models aren't censored and won't refuse to answer in the middle of your coding session.
> you have roughly the same performance,
From actually using these models, I disagree. The open weight models are nice for lower cost tasks, but having spent time with a lot of models I cannot agree that the open weight models are roughly the same performance.
Most of us use subscription plans for personal work, which makes the price difference to the hosted open weights models smaller or negligible. I’d rather spend a little more if it reduces the time I have to spend reworking or restarting with new prompts.
Kimi K3 might be close, but it’s not actually open weight yet. They’ve just committed to releasing the weights. The only provider you can get it from is Moonshot. I haven’t spent too much time with it, but from what I’ve seen it’s not actually Fable level even though some benchmarks say that.
One of the people I know works in really sensitive healthcare and I asked them the same thing out of curiosity. Now aside from the first doubt of any thing could be removed because of as you say nearby hosted Chinese model.
The reasons are:
1. A less valid reason but (iirc) its their clients who believe that American models are safer in that context. Fighting their client about that demand is really hard given the really sensitive work that they deal with.
2. Their system actually makes it so from my understanding that even the employes couldn't access the private data itself or have some really hard lockdowns. They use some sort of service provided by Azure for that with GPT models.
IMO, the thing that they were worried about were more the deprecation of previous models and they reluctantly have to switch models and the models censorship which is a real pressing concern for them
The previous gpt model that they were on (I think 4o/5 I am not sure) was more willing to answer their questions. The recent models are more like "let me stop you just right there" and other censorship.
With models switching and being forced to change to models which aren't as effective for use cases, a point comes where they might change from it altogether into open-weights model hosted on nearby servers, but I think that they are waiting to see how things pan out really
>and you have an order of magnitude more bang for your buck
Maybe if you're paying API rates, but if your usage fits within the American labs' plan reset windows (5-hour + weekly limits), their plans are likely cheaper than chinese models, because they're heavily discounted[1]
[1] https://x.com/SemiAnalysis_/status/2064815044085318040
How does it connect to let's say, vscode. I would love to move away from Claude, but it's really easy to set up. Just add a vscode extension
You can use opencode
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=sst-dev....
OpenCode is my main driver (enables me to switch models at will) and I like it very much.
Same way. Kilocode for example has a VS Code extension and let’s you use any model
Every AI has a vscode extension or similar single install.
The Chinese models are only temporarily cheaper, because they are subsidised the same way that frontier models are. Once those companies need to make money the subsidy will disappear.
But the models will still be there to use.
yes, but not necessarily cheaper
The barriers for me are lower quality (perceived and actual), upfront cost, and more choices to make.
China bad. Or if you want to rationalize your xenophobia, you’d say the Chinese models will secretly backdoor your code and kill your grandma.
As opposed to the US models which will commit crimes on your behalf and kill your nephew. Pick your poison.
Nowadays I see more Palestine protests than Tibet.
If the CCP actually gave a shit about how the West sees them they should lean in on this but the difference between the USSR and China is that the Chinese don't secretly crave acceptance.
What model would you suggest?
Is censorship not an issue with Chinese models?
It's about whether or not their censorship affects you. Their models are censored for the Chinese audience. Meanwhile Anthropic OpenAI etc models are censored for the American audience.
So by default you'd be better with one of the Chinese models if you're American.
The restrictions aren't symmetric at all.
Chinese models have government-enforced censorship, while American models have security and legal restrictions.
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As long as you’re not asking it for help discussing a trip to tiananmen square. “Censor” is probably the wrong word. Chinese models are “censored” but much less restricted. For all intents and purposes, Chinese models are less “censored” / “restricted” / “limited”.
Many Chinese frontier models aren't censored, at least for Tiananmen etc. They'll discuss them freely if served through non-Chinese providers. The Chinese providers seem to have some kind of quite crude external censorship latet.
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Far less than OAI or Anthropic’s censorship. If you really care about it, you can use a completely uncensored edition of Qwen.
With any open weights model you can get it and abliterate the censorship.
Can’t do that with OAI and Claude
Not for coding or office work which is the majority of use cases.
I'd say no more than in Usanian models?