[razster]

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.

[culi]

ModelScope is the Chinese equivalent of Hugging Face and a good back up. All the open models are Chinese anyways

[thot_experiment]

Not true! Mistral is really really good, but I agree that there isn't a single decent open model from the USA.

[culi]

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

[thot_experiment]

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.

[BoredomIsFun]

> 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.

[seanmcdirmid]

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?

[BoredomIsFun]

> It’s really hard to beat qwen coder, for role play

I am not sure if you actually tried that. Mistrals are widely asccepted go-to models for roleplay and creative writing. No Qwens are good at prose, except for their latest big Qwen 3.5.

> I don’t think their corpus is lacking in western knowledge,

It absolutely does, especially pop culture knowledge.

[Eupolemos]

Why are you talking price when we are talking local AI?

That doesn't make any sense to me. Am I missing something?

[dirasieb]

15 missed calls from your local power company

[culi]

Your electricity is free?

[seanmcdirmid]

Apple silicon is crazy efficient as well as being comparable to GPUs in performance for max and ultra chips.

[cpburns2009]

If you have the hardware to run expensive models, is the cost of electricity much of a factor? According to Google, the average price in the Silicon Valley Area is $0.448 per kWh. An RTX 5090 costs about $4,000 and has a peak power consumption of 1000 W. Maxing out that GPU for a whole year would cost $3,925 at that rate. It's not particularly more expensive than that hardware itself.

[thot_experiment]

for almost the entire year, yes.

[ac29]

Arcee is working on that, see a blog post about their newest in progress model here: https://www.arcee.ai/blog/trinity-large

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.

[CamperBob2]

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.

[throwaway27448]

They can try. I don't think they'll be able to get the toothpaste back in the tube. The data will just move our of the country.

[seanmcdirmid]

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.

[dotancohen]

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?

[toofy]

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.