Comment by dalemhurley
10 hours ago
OpenAI is killing it now that they are more focused. Killing projects like Sora et al have seen it go from irrelevant to level footing with Anthropic.
Sol is so much better than Fable 5. Then we get Astra (yet to use it) few days after Fable 5.1 (which is very impressive).
Codex is slightly better than Claude Code.
Good on Sam Altman getting back to basics and turning OpenAI around.
I think it mostly shows that there is no moat and the only advantage the U.S companies have over the Chinese is more compute. Qwen Max, Kimi K3, GLM 5.3 are really close to Opus/Sol/Fable/Astra and they are open weights.
From my experience with complex coding tasks (AI infra), I don't think these open weight models are close.
You can argue that TSMC has no moat since Intel and Samsung are also able to eventually make a node as good as TSMC - just a few years later and at smaller scale.
And no one would say that about TSMC.
So there is clearly a moat there somewhere.
No. In the semiconductor industry, the "catch-up" player isn't normally spending less in absolute R&D terms.
Comparing the R&D costs of creating GPT-4o vs. DeepSeek V3 (the latest gen for which we already have good accurate numbers) it looks like the latter cost 1/20th as much to create.
If Samsung could catch up with TSMC for 1/20th of the cost, people definitely would say that TSMC has no moat.
9 replies →
Yeah, I'm not sure if "no moat" analogy stands for chip manufacturing. Even if foundries acquire lithographic nodes, the procedures (temperature, duration, etc) are for them to figure out and are usually kept secret. This secret could be the "moat" that differentiates each foundry's operational capabilities.
bringing the price down b.c. competition != no moat.
There's not 100 frontier labs, it's not like airline companies
About the same, 5-10, when you consider major (aka frontier) airlines.
Actually not a bad comparison. Both burn massive amounts of up front capital to protect an oligopoly in the hopes their commodity product eventually pays off.
The "moat" is the "harness", the app.
For most people, the app IS the AI.
And even for its wonkiness, ChatGPT has had the best UX/UI of them all.
The way to win the AI wars in the eyes of the common folk is through the frontend, to be the Apple of AI, as it were.
this basically says you don't believe there is real AI.
they don't have moat in hardware either
Chinese counterpart like CXMT and Huawei is begin producing their own chip
You cant block an entire nation level effort with tariff
I think the moat that China has is energy costs. It's taking learnings from the Bitter Lesson. If you role up scale and compute to the next level, it's energy resources. China has it and sharing open weight models is an effective means of removing the tech moat. This idea has been floating around for a bit now (I'm not taking credit for it).
3 replies →
If there was no moat, nvidia and meta would have SoTA models too.
Nvidia does have one of the best completely open models. Open weights are nice but Nemotron is open training data too.
Meta is awfully close.
2 replies →
It is not in nvidia’s interest to be too good at model creation
8 replies →
[dead]
[flagged]
why so much negativity and certainty?
They have a lot of moat, i'm not sure what youa re talking about. Only amatures are using Qwen, open source stuff that is 3-8 weeks behind. Plus OpenAI has some verticals that keep people in there.
In what way do they have a moat? A cursory look at https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/gpt-6-astra#intelligenc... it lands at 61, only a single point above glm 5.3 while costing significantly more.
The only moat they appear to have is by hoarding compute, and the current trajectory of hardware shows that isn't permanent either for very long
I wish people could see how some of this reads. You are an “amateur” using a model 6-8 weeks behind? Really? Sigh.
> Sol is so much better than Fable 5
I'm genuinely so confused when people say this with a straight face. Are you talking about coding? Desktop use? Prose? Or something else?
Sol is a much smaller models and it shows. It often misses the forest for the trees.
I feel like a lot happened this week and people are glazing how ridiculously strong Flash 3.8 is right now compared to Fable/Opus/Sol/Astra.
Flash 3.8 is rad. Easily my daily driver now. Only downside is it's Gemini so sometimes it just keeps going until it wants to be done.
>> I'm genuinely so confused when people say this with a straight face. Are you talking about coding? Desktop use? Prose? Or something else?
Same. It makes me wonder what types of things the person must be working on.
This is perpetually an issue with the whole field of AI/LLMs. The experience is so personal. Every time I talk to someone about their use of LLMs for software engineering, I'm shocked by their approaches and experiences. They say "X model keeps missing things" when I rely on it heavily for being thorough. They say "Y always gives me the best results" when I can't stand it.
People will see/think that I'm doing very well with my LLM use, and ask me what I'm doing. I tell them, they try it, then later they come back to me saying they just couldn't get it to work.
1 reply →
I’ve found Sol performance to be incredibly spiky. It has tremendous IQ and can fix very difficult bugs. But it is horrible at design (both visual and system design), anything that involves thinking about users or UX, and massively overcomplicates almost all work.
I vastly prefer Sol. It does what I tell it to almost exactly, pretty much every time.
I work on very low level stuff (think RTL/FPGA, firmware, software where optimising for nanoseconds is just normal).
For me Sol is the only cost effective model available. Fable 5.1 is indeed good and vastly better than original Fable (which refused to work on most of my stuff for 'safety' reasons).
It's very good at this sort of low level stuff to the point that I really can't understand/relate to people having a good time with Opus (which comparatively performs extremely poorly on my particular workload).
I also just don't like how lazy Anthropic models are. They will do 10% of what is asked and then summarily declare victory.
Sol on the other hand is more like "one of us", slight touch of the 'tism, extremely pedantic, will go to the edge of the known universe if that is what it takes to prove/fix/build what you asked for or run out out of credits trying.
It's a personal and workload dependent thing. For me right now Sol for 99% of stuff because Fable 5.1 still burns through $5k in credits a day.
Can confirm this as well, mostly VHDL and HLS. Sol and Fable can reason about performance and designs consistently. Whereas Opus and others seem to just throw generic optimisation techniques at the wall unprovoked (while hallucinating a justification + expected improvement) until the synth reports improve.
Agree 100%. And I also work a lot on lower level / systems stuff (including RTL here and there, too). Opus is sloppy, and leaves negative cases all over. The GPT models in Codex have a more pedantic and detail oriented "personality." Often to a fault.
Sol will leave a mess of excessive redundant tests and isn't so great at abstraction ; but it produces more reliable working systems.
It's kind of nice to have access to both, but I don't have the $$ for that right now, so I just keep the Codex sub
I noticed the same. I wanted a simple crud webapp and suggested an insane techstack involving C#, Razor Pages, MSSQL and more. I went with my planned setup of python flask with an sqlite db which served me well for years.
It's still incredibly important to have a human in the loop correcting design decisions and having good taste.
Was your prompt just "I want a simple crud webapp" and that's the extent of it? There's absolutely no way you included the words "python", "flask", or "sqlite" and it still went with a Microsoft stack.
Dotnet minimal APIs plus mssql is fine for simple crud apps… I would do Postgres, but that’s me.
Swapping mssql to SQLite would also work perfectly
You could have just added “flask SQLite stack” to whatever prompt you added. Just those three words, randomly somewhere in your prompt.
> insane techstack involving C#, Razor Pages, MSSQL
Is a very sane tech stack, you're just biased against Microsoft.
Half the world's enterprise apps run on that combination, or a minor variation of it.
Like Java it is full featured ("batteries included") but unlike Java it is relatively terse and actually pleasant to work with.
Oh, and unlike Python, it is very fast, within spitting distance of compiled Rust and C++ web apps.
1 reply →
> massively overcomplicates almost all work
People with high IQ often do this IRL. There's training tension in this area. Intelligence and overcomplication correlate and are hard to extricate.
Intelligence is actually correlated with the ability to simplify complicated things. Occam's razor. Compression as comprehension.
1 reply →
Sol better than Fable? What? I've found it to basically be on part with Opus and I max out 2 accounts on both providers every week.
Their ads business is also doing well. Not "will recover all compute costs" well, but crossed $1b in a few months.
Its funny, my experience with Sol has been awful. It really overworks problems and tracks into areas it does not need to...
I just dont get how its good for some, and bad for others. It makes me suspect that the models performance is not even against problem sets and it really is just a probabilistic prediction machine. Which then makes me very skeptical of GPT-6 Astra, because if their big claim is Computer Use then it is probably bad in a bunch of other areas.
It is funny indeed, people sometimes with same amount of experience with software development, get vastly different experiences from different models and harnesses.
> I just dont get how its good for some, and bad for others.
If I were to listen to my hunch, it would tell me that it's all up to the prompts that ends up going over the wire (including all the bloat some people have), what workflow/process you use and what the existing state of the project is.
You have to bake the 'lazy dev'/'keep it simple stupid' mentality into your AGENTS.md and / or the skills you're using to design things. It will take things too literally sometimes so you also have to make sure you're being accurate. Best way I've found to use it is make it ask you clarifying questions about what you're trying to build and have it help design the shape of the thing. Then it writes the instructions in a format it understands.
I've had Claude do the same thing where it goes off and spends 100% of my tokens on 3 functions and an ungodly amount of tests / scaffolding that do almost nothing when I gave it an underdeveloped idea.
Codex's lack of auto-mode is what prevents me from using it for serious work compared to Claude Code.
It has had automode for a bit now. I use it every day at work.
Put it in an isolated container and set it to YOLO
Codex is missing a few things that Claude code has had for some time like defined plugin subagents and a few other things. But overall it’s fairly capable. The biggest gripe I have is that codex really restricts context window sizes and compaction leads to a lot of grounding work, and overall codex GPT is too literal in many situations - it’s follows direction slavishly, and when subagent reviewers are used, they tend to find increasingly obscure “flaws” on the instruction following impetus, and the harness agent takes them literally as issues to fix even when it leads to bizarre outcomes. For instance I’ve had several runs where it tries to end up building a hermetic system with sha hashing of everything (including operating system binaries and kernels, tool chains, etc) to certify test results are valid, etc. I have to sort of watch it carefully to be sure it’s not drifting into some insane yak shaving corner, which it will happily do for weeks on end.
Claude has the exact opposite problem, especially opus-5, where I literally can’t trust it to print hello world without taking a shortcut, or just simply lying and saying it printed it when it didn’t, behind a giant wall of inscrutable text. I find it very ironic that Anthropic is the vendor of the lazy lying cheating model that does almost everything you tell it to it do.
I’d really kill for something that balances instruction following and loop escaping behavior better. Fable 5.1 does seem a lot better, feeling more like 4.6 behavior, and honestly Sol has improved as well. I’m pretty psyched for the next generation, as I think the competition has heated up so much that things will improve really fast to the point of marginal utility opportunity being increasingly close to epsilon.
You can enable the 1 million token context window and adjust when it compacts in your config.
> model_context_window = 1000000
> model_auto_compact_token_limit = 900000
I believe it does consume your usage a bit faster though.
Unless things changed this used to work but was blocked. You also used to be able to force in a model catalog to get around the token cap. Each, as of at least April, were closed off and ineffectual. I’ve not tried lately so you may be right.
Opus 5 is a genuinely infuriating model. I hate it’s behavior.
We have a mandate to only use 4-8. Sonnet 5 is pretty good and fable 5-1 has been pretty good so far fwiw.
This is what Google needs to do and is probably why Demis has stepped back a bit
Killing Sora was one of the worst mistakes they ever made
100% they should have not given up on video.
That announcement is when I stopped paying attention to them.
please tell us why
Rich media is where all the innovation is happening now and in the future.
Text-to-text is dead, has been since Mistral 7b.
Solved problem (you guys like that one don’t you)
They also demoted themselves from “authority on AI” to “in over our heads” by bowing out in the pathetically defeatist way they did at the worst time possible (Hailuo/MiniMax/Vidu coming up) - they naturally completely missed the wave on audio with random companies like Singify taking that market for free.
They just bowed out. They didn’t try. They didn’t try anything more than baseline text-to-text and they aren’t good at that (or code) either, compared to what others are doing.
It’s a really bad position to be in if you’re trying to be an Apple or Microsoft.
To have a mediocre product and then can’t even serve 75% of the mainstream use case.
1 reply →
[dead]
[flagged]
> Sol is so much better than Fable 5.
... looks around ...
[dead]