Comment by buckleyourshoe
14 hours ago
Competition drives prices down. We tried Kimi and GLM models after hitting 'cybersecurity' blocks on OpenAI and Anthropic. We found them to be much cheaper to access and helped us complete our work without 'cybersecurity' refusals blocking us.
They just started competing against each other? No.
Anthropic is going public soon. Until September, OpenAI was going public. Neither are remotely profitable.
They're not competing against each other, they're competing against free/local/open weight models that they're also lobbying very hard to regulate/ban.
Of course they compete with each other. Codex and Claude Code have direct feature overlap.
But they do have a common enemy in open weight models.
As much as I hear this sentiment, and as much as all the smart software people around me echo the desire for this sentiment to be true; it feels like people say these things, but then at the same time say - well, Claude/Chatgpt is still marginally better for me now. But clearly they are catching up so maybe one day!!!
In that sense, I'm really not sure if Kimi/chinese models are really competing against Anthropic/OAI? Not to mention that for individuals, the subscription model is extremely different, and Kimi subs are (I think) worse value, and chinese API's maybe marginally end up cheaper than using american subscriptions.
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Price per task has been dropping exponentially for years. This isn’t a sudden new phenomenon. They’ve been competing with each other continuously. There is even more competition now than ever before.
The brutal free market for job seekers like me but regulations and safety nets for thee
If this is mostly competition enduced, I have to assume either their usage has plummeted or they will implode financially in short order.
The frontier labs were already burning money on more expensive price models, and competition wouldn't have reduced their capex proportionately.
How could they do anything but implode financially? Genuinely curious. The numbers are not right.
Did the frontier labs take out debt or did they make flimsy unenforceable agreements to neoclouds who took out debt?
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The government could bail them out, that's the most likely scenario if they don't implode IMO.
They could also continue to grow at the rates they had last year. I don't know where those customers would come from, but if they did pull that off OpenAI and Anthropic could sustain propping up the circular financing going around the AI industry.
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Apple is worth more than all the AI companies combined. You think LLMs are less valuable in the global market than slightly updated iPhone models every year?
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Their costs could drop, competition could dry up, or they may only be unprofitable in the first place because they’re choosing to invest more money in growing their business than they’re currently making, a practice which need not and will not continue indefinitely.
It’s not at all unusual for companies to run at a loss for several years before turning a profit.
Stuff like this that defies all logic happens all the time. Amazon operated at a massive loss first it’s first decade and still IPO’d years before they posted a profit.
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That's why Anthropic are rushing the IPO. You can explain a single quarter slowdown, you can not explain a multi quarter one.
What makes you say that Anthropic has multi quarter slowdowns?
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> If this is mostly competition enduced, I have to assume either their usage has plummeted or they will implode financially in short order.
If we assume it's due to competition, then their usage has precisely not plummeted because they cut prices by 80%.
> or they will implode financially
They are too big to implode.
So much this. I’m using these models primarily for dumb hobby projects and I’ve still hit this a lot - although much less so in Opus 5.5.
I wouldn’t be surprised if US “bans” access to the Chinese models by the end of the year
How?
I think your question is rhetorical, in which case I agree with the sentiment.
The US absolutely could (and very well might) make Chinese models illegal, possibly open weight models in general, but all that will do is keep them out of the hands of law abiding US citizens.
Law breakers in the US and the entire rest of the world would still have access, and nothing in the US will be any safer. People who think regulation will solve the problem should be embarrassed by their ignorance.
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If you are a legally operating company in the US just saying it's banned is enough, the threat of enforcement is enough pressure.
You and I obviously can just use a VPN, but 99% of usage is likely as part of a company.
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I'm in the same boat. Had to switch to GLM because Claude refuses all native work nowadays.
"Hi Claude, there's clearly a memory leap in our software. It clearly balloons over time. Here's a few heap dumps from various points in the day"
"Unfortunately memory safety issues and OOM errors are clearly restricted cyber work, contact your nearest screaming void if you want to appeal this decision"
What harness are you all using? OpenCode?
At this point I'd rather try to invest effort and usage in a harness that is FOSS and is actually steered by a non-profit. Goose comes to mind and to be honest I haven't tried it beyond installing and giving it a prompt or two.
Comiong to harnesses, even Pi seems like a weird choice. I mean Pi, until it's "your own customised Pi", is pretty useless and pointless. Besides they are also starting to have their own models/infra business (or is it mostly proxy like OpenCode?).
I have also given up on Herdr and came back to Tmux (and doing a bit of customisation slowly, as I need it). I wanted to try dsh but somehow couldn't brave it. Maybe once I have a good container/vm setup is ready. I know I am biased/discriminatory here, but there are things about which I'd be better safe than sorry.
As for OpenCode: I used V1 a lot and I am struggling with V2 currently. Yes, it just doesn't feel right. It's neither here, nor there. I am not a harness reviewer, so I won't be able to put that into industry accepted words and tests but it doesn't feel useful and right to me. At least Pi is completely stripped (it might be changing though) and then you can make it as you want it. Even Claude Code is better than OpenCode and that's saying something. I find Codex to be quite effective but it doesn't feel familiar. I am still in the middle of some work so I am using OpenCode v2 a lot (and then there's OpenCode Go and I won't want to play around a lot with it) but I will move away. Where? I am not sure yet.
What I feel will work for me? I guess a harness of my own! Forked something smaller/similar? I don't know. No, really! Just like I have never found the "my" notes app and journal app yet, I don't think I should use any of these harnesses if it doesn't work for me, especially now that I can kinda make one (hail LLM/vibe coding :P). It doesn't even have to be a TS/Node monsters most of these harnesses are. More I am reading about, digging deeper (haven't been quite far yet), how models and the "local setup" interact, the more I end up scratching my head – why all this drama and why all these 5 billion GitHub star "harnesses" with trillions of lines of code! Why? It doesn't make sense!
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I have a harness for my harnesses now. My Hermes manages Codex, CC or Cursor now and interact with me via Slack and PRs on GitHub.
It's nice because I can keep going from anywhere, other team members can see and interject in my Slack threads, and Hermes auto updates its skills with any adjustments that we make so we don't have to ask twice.
I found Claude Code to work best. You can use it with any compatible API.
Personally I've found Zed's agent to be much superior to OpenCode. IDK why but it gets better results from the same model on the same task. Using with GLM 5.3 and DeepSeek 4.1.
Pi.dev at home.
And I’m slowly writing my own. But it’s garbage at the moment.
I wrote one and kept iterating by using it to fix bugs in itself
I still also use other harnesses, but mine is already at the point where I prefer it more often than not
You should totally keep working on yours. It’s a cool learning experience. And you might stumble on some good ideas that nobody else has had
Don’t write your own. Fork maki.sh and customize it like I did. It’s built in Rust and is absolutely amazing.
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What kind of hardware do you need to run a useful LLM at home? To train one?
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For me, I used Zed Agent with Codex as it has native integration with Zed's ACP so it's pretty convenient.
However, Anthropic is pickier about the harnesses you can use with Claude Code and I noticed discrepancies when using Zed's External Agent feature with Claude Code, so I just use the Claude app. It's fine.
Crush is great and easy to hack on: https://github.com/charmbracelet/crush
Is ths the one that was OpenCode? Or some story/controversy with OpenCode? You know sale, founders moving around and all…?
I've been pretty satisfied with OpenCode 2
> much cheaper to access
I'm calling BS. I use Kimi, chatGPT (Astra/Sol), and Claude (Opus 5.5), and Kimi is by far the most expensive in terms of tokens and $/work done. Using OpenCode harness.
yea but I thought they had a massive compute shortage. Something doesn't add up. Imagine there being a beef shortage and the beef producers cut prices because "competition". why?
Massive increases in efficiency and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
If the beef producers don't believe beef is a commodity and they want to get you addicted to their specific beef then it makes sense. Right now in these companies life cycles profit doesn't actually matter. The only thing that matters is how much of their beef is being consumed. They want to give people so much free beef they can't even imagine the idea of having a meal that doesn't contain beef.