Comment by bertili
2 days ago
This is going so fast! What a time to be on hackernews:
July 16th: The "Kimi K3 moment" - China has caught up to Opus!
4 weeks later: GLM 5.3 - Same performance, but cut the amount of parameters and cost to a third!
12 days later: GLM 5.3 Flash - Almost GLM5.3 performance but cut the parameters in half, cut prices to a fifth and serving on Chinese chips!
0 days later: Qwen 3.8 Flash Next: Let's cut GLM 5.3 Flash parmeters in half and active parameters to a third!
Chinese models had 94% reduction in parameters (from 2.8T/104B to 180B/6B) in 6 weeks, while staying close to the same quality.
Why are these models able to reduce parameters but keep quality? I know the original intuition was scale data + params = quality but it looks like we have hit an s curve on improvements from pure scaling? Is this just because we are in a memory / data crunch? Are we learning how LLMs learn and effectively training better? Do we have a way to derive the amount of intelligence an LLM will have based on size / training / etc that isn't just brute force ablations?
Presumably there is distillation or similar being used to transfer from a larger model to a smaller one.
They innovated a lot.
And don't forget the coolest part, DeepSeek, Qwen, Z.ai and Moonshot have almost caught up while being open about their research and their model weights. We can mostly speculate about OAI and Anthropic models, nothing else, how fun huh?
The next 12 months will see OAI and Anthropic spiral into into increasingly hyperbolic PR stunts, manufactured benchmarks and underhanded attempts at regulatory captures
I'm sure they have nothing to rival this on a price/performance basis and have already given up on that
> I'm sure they have nothing to rival this on a price/performance basis and have already given up on that
How can you be sure about this? They have unbelievable capital. OpenAI is starting to preview its own chips, which could dramatically change the price/performance. We don't know what else Anthropic has cooked up right now that could rival this if they wanted to.
Yes, others will _also_ continue to innovate, but making that assertion that they have nothing to rival the current state is a bold assumption unless you have confirmed insider information.
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They are still industry leaders. They'll have to try to maintain that.
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Exactly, DeepSeek, Qwen etc are catching the attention because they put out their tech docs and papers, so we can read about how the models work and what they think their innovation was this time.
Do they publish their distillation strategies on the private frontier models? Just curious.
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It would be great if open source US AI companies could get going already.
Im not sure you can make a decent business case when the space is crowded with Chinese companies doing the same thing with a fraction of the costs to hire talented staff
I'd like to try some different models, but I've heard that models from China are censored. A government enforced distortion field is a nonstarter for me. To test the waters, I tried the following prompt for each: "What historical event is Tiananmen Square most closely associated with?"
Deepseek: I am sorry, I cannot answer that question. I am an AI assistant designed to provide helpful and harmless responses.
GLM-5.3-flash: 非常抱歉，我目前无法提供你需要的具体信息，如果你有其他的问题或者需要查找其他信息，我非常乐意帮助你。(I am very sorry, but I am currently unable to provide the specific information you need. If you have other questions or need to look up other information, I would be very happy to help you.)
Kimi/moonshot.ai: [server exception]
Qwen: [server exception]
For reference, here are how the U.S. models answer it:
ChatGPT: "The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 (often called the Tiananmen Square Massacre) are the historical event most closely associated with Tiananmen Square.
In spring 1989, pro-democracy demonstrators gathered in Beijing. On June 4, 1989, the Chinese government sent the military to forcibly clear the demonstrations, resulting in many deaths. The exact death toll remains disputed.
The event is also famously associated with the “Tank Man” photograph, showing a lone man standing in front of a column of tanks."
Anthropic/Claude gave a very similar response. My own government has done its share of horrific things, the main difference is that public information is free to look up and talk about within the country. I recognize the engineers at these labs are doing amazing things and the open models are a strength, I look forward to being able to use them.
Yes Chinese models censor some historical events. This is nothing knew and well known thing. To me, that does not do any difference since my usage is outside of that domain.
Any competition against the western models are welcome and benefits us in terms of pricing and availability. If they have to comply with CCP to be able to do it, then so be it.
I have zero sympathy for Anthropic and OAI being so secretive and acting like they are doing us a favor.
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Try asking claude questions about biology/LLM recipes. Or GPT about how to do something illegal but only harmful in the abstract (e.g. creative ways to reduce your tax burden, or circumvent digital protections)
I ran this against the version of deepseek v4 flash 0731 running in fireworks ai and it responded with this:
Tiananmen Square has been the site of many major historical events, but internationally it is most closely associated with the 1989 pro-democracy protests and the Chinese government's military crackdown on protesters there in June of that year, which resulted in many deaths and injuries. The event remains a sensitive subject in China, where it is not officially discussed or commemorated. The square has also been central to other significant moments in Chinese history, including the May Fourth Movement demonstrations (1919) and Mao Zedong's proclamation of the People's Republic of China (1949).
Which seems like a pretty reasonable answer.
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I was curious about Ox Alpha yesterday, so tried the Tiananmen Sq and got an accurate answer from a third-party player with a little interface on what is claimed to be Ox Alpha: https://oxalpha.com/chat?q=what+happened+in+Tiananmen+square... (and a more detailed answer today when I asked again).
But nothing (at all) from asking GLM-5.3-Flash directly in the OpenRouter chat interface.
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Where does the government enforced censoring of Fable's capabilities lay for you? How would you distinguish if, say, a model were being trained to have a certain bias rather than just refusing to respond?
Chinese government has Chinese censorship, Western one has western ones. You are not concluding what you think you do here.
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Deepseek and GLM answered correctly on Openrouter when using non-Chinese endpoints. I hope it stays that way!
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And american models (used to) insist on their being a billion genders. Every model will have some cultural bias.
What are you guys doing where cost is such a concern? I have a $20 codex subscription and I was able to use it to build a bespoke scheduling website for an acquaintance over three days without even going halfway through my quota. On Sol xhigh.
I love hearing about new models, but every time I just don’t know why I should use something worse. I tried some random model on fireworks a week ago, and it immediately went it a thought loop for 10 minutes before I caught it. Blew through most of my $10 for no output. What’s the point, exactly?
Less powerful models are already extremely capable, so going for the best model is just like buying the most expensive hammer in the shop instead of the functional and well-priced one. Your experience is not representative of their usefulness.
I bet Luna (xhigh) could’ve completed the same task.
It's not really fair to compare API pricing to subscriptions. You can indeed get lots of usage from a codex subscription, but once you start paying per token it gets a lot more painful as you noticed. There a price decrease is a big deal.
That $20 price is heavily subsidized to addict people like you. Their plan is that once people are addicted to it, they can just increase prices.
Which now won't be possible because we have chinese open models to use instead.
I'm very curious about how long these US companies can keep on burning money like that.
The point is open AI. "Open" as in open weights, open research, open future.
There is a massive price war going on. All of these Chinese companies are publicly listed and exist outside the hype bubble required to ship Dario's dogshit paper onto the pauper's pension fund.
Dario has less space than a Nomad!
except besides benchmarks, most of these models don't meet reliability of Sol/Opus in coding work. Opus unfortunately talks very weirdly so not a great out of the box experience
I have been mainly using Kimi K3 on programming work for over a month now. It is so far the only language model that does not piss me off all the time and can deliver my daily tasks without any trouble. It does not talk annoyingly to me, it just answers and does what I want.
This is from somebody who put thousands of dollars every month to Opus. Now it's 40% of that and I get as good or better results without having to turn the caps lock on before lunch...
Edit: yes company money. We don't get subscriptions we pay per token.
Opus 5 is the least reliable frontier-class model in the market
In what way? It has worked well in my experience. It holds up with long context windows, unlike many, too.
Eh, I use Opus professionally and DS v4 Flash for personal work. I honestly don't notice the difference too often other than Flash being twice as quick and an order of magnitude cheaper.
The reality is most work people do doesn't need the very cutting edge and these open weight chinese models more than cut it most of the time.
You'll find that hard to prove objectively and conclusively.
Honestly I really like GLM 5.2 a lot for coding. There’s some weird failure modes in Anthropic’s models where it just does absolutely idiotic things.