[rvz]

Imagine still saying this after open weight models being released everywhere and the likes of DeepSeek keeping their prices at the lowest possible for more than good enough intelligence that even Microsoft is migrating to deploy DeepSeek's models.

[nl]

I use DeepSeek. I'm very familiar with open models. I run a popular benchmark to check their progress.

DeepSeek is somewhere between Sonnet and Opus in capability, for much lower price.

Their $0.87 per million output tokens is one of the few API offerings that is probably subsidized (the break-even price is probably around $2 judging by[1])

I think Anthropic and OpenAI's margins will erode some over time. But I think they are very profitable now on the API prices they are charging, and their margins will remain healthy.

Put it like this: AWS is a very expensive way of getting compute, and there are numerous competitors that are much cheaper.And yet AWS is very profitable.

[1] https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-pro#providers

[xela79]

I find that Deepseek Pro to be below Sonnet 4.6 for much of the coding/review/executing tasks from plan. The only good thing it has going is the price. It will is cheaper for it to crunch through your well worked out implementation plans, it's slower, makes more errors, needs more tokens to fix those. And even at that increased spent it does deliver in the end. More tokens, lower cost, slower.

I use it as something that sits right below Sonnet for daily tasks that can be run in loops with validation checks, perfect. Anything more advanced...it just doesn't cut it.

Same experience with z-ai glm 5.1 btw... don't know what system prompt magic antrophic set in front of their Sonnet 4.6, but it does execute tasks efficiently.

claiming any of these deepseek models are close to opus is a bit optimistic

[surgical_fire]

I use Claude at work, DeepSeek at home.

For software development, I notice no difference. For all the work I did using AI, DeepSeek is as capable as claude.

[Alphanymous]

Have you tried other tools like windsurf? Or other free open source Ai?

[surgical_fire]

I never tried Windsurf, no.

I tried DeepSeek and MiMo through both Claude Code and Pi.dev. I found Claude Code a slightly better harness, but I still have both installed and switch around frequently.

As for "open source AI", what exactly are you talking about? Is it open models?

I tried some through Ollama, but I don't have the hardware to run decent models.

[scottyeager]

Did you mean Sonnet and Opus?

[nl]

Yes, edited, thanks.

[scottyeager]

Sure!

[NetOpWibby]

Microsoft has been dead last at everything for decades, so that point isn't surprising.

[Quothling]

Microsoft quietly won the AI race in enterprise with the addition of cowork to their copilot app. Being in the energy sector in Europe we're quite limited in what we can do because of things like NIS2 compliance. We have access to corporate AI tool though the equity fund which owns part of us, and while it allows you to create personalized agents that can run sub agents and use "skills" it's all done without any form of filesystem access. Being married to Microsoft because our IT loves that sort of thing, and having spend a decade in the public sector I sort of get why from an enterprise perspective, anyway, we have always had access to their Copilot app. Which has been so bad that it's actively turned people away from AI. Then last month we get cowork frontier, and now I'm in the process of helping everyone adopt it. Not only does it play directly into our licenses, it also has access to all the Microsoft 365 stuff, so that our HR can use it to sort applications into the categories they belong in and what not. Sure they could've had a better on-boarding system, but they don't so someone has to go through the emails and sort "financial controller" from "sheep shepherd" (yes, we have sheep on our solar plants).

Anyway I'm rambling, what Microsoft is doing with AI in enterprise is basically what they did with Teams and similar systems. They provide a platform for it which is good enough that your organisation is going to want it rather than deal with multiple vendors. Not for tech organisations, but for every other enterprise organisation it'll be so much easier to just go this way. I imagine that Anthropic is getting some sort of payment from Microsoft for Cowork, but what Cowork shows is that Microsoft can be completely model agnostic and still sell "top" AI. Especially because they've set cost on a fixed rate that I'm sure they'll increase by 25% every year.

Or do things like the fact that you need some sort of special Agent 365 license for your sysadmins to manage the admin.microsoft part of Copilot which has to do with security policies... Ask me if it was fun doing that agent by agent... It's frankly the most Microsoft thing I've ever seen.

[nullbio]

I think OpenAI will still maintain the lead for at least another few years.

The cost of hardware still needs to dramatically drop for open-weight models to be viable for local usage. Even with the release of things like Nvidia DGX Spark and Ryzen AI Halo, you'd likely want a few of them to run agents in parallel.

Sure, you can use cloud hosted variants of models like DeepSeek etc at API rates, but subscriptions still come out on top for bulk usage. GPT is already tightly integrated into peoples workflows, has wide adoption, has good tooling for developers, etc.

Plus there's nothing stopping them from competing on a price level if they really feel the need. It just means they might burn more cash in the short term.

[zozbot234]

> The cost of hardware still needs to dramatically drop for open-weight models to be viable for local usage. Even with the release of things like Nvidia DGX Spark and Ryzen AI Halo, you'd likely want a few of them to run agents in parallel.

It's more efficient to do the opposite on a constrained platform. Run agents in parallel using a single model, then round-robin among models for cross-checking purposes. (The makers of local inference engines are dropping the ball by not making batched inference a first-class citizen of that workflow. It's not just useful for vLLM and SGlang.)

[LeFantome]

Looking forward to GLM-5.2 in OpenCode.

But a lot of other people are going to happily shell out for Opus 4.8 at way higher prices.

[SyneRyder]

I think it's out now - or do you mean as part of the Zen subscription?

The API GLM 5.2 launched last night with several providers on OpenRouter. I had a short conversation, didn't get to test much, but initial impressions "the vibes were good".

[psv2522]

I think op is on the go sub, i m on the same we have glm5.1 but dont see glm5.2 yet

[Daviey]

Been using GLM-5.2 in OpenCode since Saturday, what are you waiting for?

[w29UiIm2Xz]

What's the adage, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it

[nl]

My salary is in no way dependent on OpenAI or Anthropic (in fact I could probably get more money if we switched to using open models and they were just as capable).