It's insane how much traffic HF must be pushing out of the door. I routinely download models that are hundreds of gigabytes in size from them. A fantastic service to the sovererign AI community.
My fear is that these large "AI" companies will lobby to have these open source options removed or banned, growing concern. I'm not sure how else to explain how much I enjoy using what HF provides, I religiously browse their site for new and exciting models to try.
Mistral is cool and I wish them success but it consistently ranks extremely low on benchmarks while still being expensive. Chinese models like DeepSeek might rank almost as low as Mistral but they are significantly cheaper. And Kimi is the best of both worlds with incredible benchmark results while still being incredibly cheap
I know things change rapidly so I'm not counting them out quite yet but I don't see them as a serious contender currently
Sure, benchmarks are fake and I use Mistral over equivalently sized models most of the time because it's better in real life. It runs plenty fast for me, I don't pay for inference.
> it consistently ranks extremely low on benchmarks
As general purpose chatbots small Mistral models are better than comparably sized Chiniese models, as they have better SimpleQA scores and general knowledge of Western culture.
It’s really hard to beat qwen coder, especially for role play where the instruction following is really useful. I don’t think their corpus is lacking in western knowledge, although I wonder if Chinese users get even better results from it?
Its still not fully post trained and its a non-reasoning model, but its worth keeping an eye on if you dont want to use the Chinese models that currently are the best open-weight options.
To be fair there are lots of worse models than OpenAI's GPT-OSS-120b. It's not a standout when positioned next to the latest releases from China, but prior to the current wave it was considered one of the stronger local models you can reasonably run.
Many of the models on hugging face are already Chinese. It’s kind of obvious that local AI is going to flourish more in China than the USA due to hardware constraints.
How do you choose which models to try for which workflows? Do you have objective tests that you run, or do you just get a feel for them while using them in your daily workflow?
it’s only a matter of time. we have all seen first hand how … wrong … these companies behave, almost on a regular basis.
there’s a small tinfoil hat part of me that suspects part of their obscene investments and cornering the hardware market is driven by an conscious attempt to stop open source local from taking off. they want it all, the money, the control, and to be the only source of information to us.
Bandwidth is not that expensive. The Big 3 clouds just want to milk customers via egress. Look at Hetzner or CloudFlare R2 if you want to get get an idea of commodity bandwidth costs.
Yup, I have downloaded probably a terabyte in the last week, especially with the Step 3.5 model being released and Minimax quants. I wonder what my ISP thinks. I hope they don't cut me off. They gave me a fast lane, they better let me use it, lol
Is that with a WISP by chance? Or in a developing country? Or are there really wired providers with such low caps in the western world in this day and age?
ATT once told me if I don't pay for their TV service then my home gigabit fiber would have a 1TB cap. They had an agreement with the apartment building so I had no other choice of provider.