[wolttam]

If you have no need for Anthropic/OpenAI's frontier model capability, you may be better served with an open-weight model that can't be taken away.

Edit:

> GPT-5 does the job.

I bring up DeepSeek V4 Flash a lot on HN, but I want to mention that according to Artificial Analysis, it trades blows with GPT-5 (high) (from August, 2025) [0]

[0]: https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/comparisons/deepseek-v4...

[lmf4lol]

We rolled out Deepseek V4 Flash to our customers and it was an absolute disaster, unfortunately. It was not able to follow simple commands, always "forgot" to do things, lied consistently about its work, and so on. It was pretty good though on on-off work, like summarizing something or executing simple commands, so we are experimenting now with using it for subagent work with clear instructions and hand off.

Deepseek V4 Pro on the other hand is a really really good main driver and we have a lot of success using it. Its not Opus or GPT-5.5 level but on its way. Kimi 2.6 as well btw.. so there is already quite some choice.

[mark_l_watson]

Your experience with DeepSeek v4 Flash differs from mine: while I usually use DeepSeek v4 Pro (that is also inexpensive), I find using DeepSeek v4 Flash with the Fireworks.ai API and properly configured OpenCode to be very good for routine work, and it is pleasantly very fast. Admittedly I use DeepSeek v4 Pro for difficult problems.

I encourage people to at least once a month to do a quick evaluation with their own problems and workflows. Estimate cost as both what inference tokens cost for a task and also how much human effort it takes to get required results.

I disregard benchmarks.

[lmf4lol]

We are also using fireworks as our model provider. Our harness is openClaw, so tasks are not only coding but all kinds of tasks. For instance, I asked to fetch some info from the web via Chrome browser and to collect the info in an MD. The MD never appeared, even though it claimed to. I asked it three times to write the MD and it was always: “oh yes, I do it now..” then nothing. The search itself also was very bad because it just gave up after one page and hallucinated an answer and - even worse :-) - told me it was very thorough…

Pro aced the task :-)

But maybe its a config issue.

[mark_l_watson]

That sounds correct: Pro for longer agentic tasks, Flash is fine for writing short programs, finding things for me in a large code base, etc.

[wolttam]

Have to ask: did you try 'xhigh' thinking effort with Flash? I also found it nearly unusable on just 'high', but on 'xhigh' it's nearly equivalent to Pro's 'high'.

[wolttam]

I found Flash to be a bit shaky as well until I started using it in xhigh/max thinking effort, then it became my daily driver. It runs quite well on a couple of DGX Sparks.

I still wish it was a little better, but there's hope for another model checkpoint (maybe with some of GLM 5.2's goodness distilled into it, that would be nice).

[girvo]

> I found Flash to be a bit shaky as well until I started using it in xhigh/max thinking effort

This is true for most of the open weight chinese models, to be fair. They're really built around long reasoning chains.

Also you're making me want a second Spark-alike :') but they're so expensive...

[lionkor]

deepseek has no part of their privacy policy on their API about training. They are 100% training on every single word you give it.

If your customers are fine with that, your IP is not interesting, then you can use it.

[radicality]

Though with open models you have a lot of choice where to get it from. I see like ~15 providers here with various logging/ZDR policies, so pick whatever mix of price to features you want:

https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash

[nextaccountic]

I don't believe a single word from AI companies, no matter where they are from. Sourcing their training data is run like genuine criminal enterprises - last year Anthropic settled for 1.5 billion, and and if they settled so quickly it might mean what we would see in court is even worse.

[anon373839]

You don’t have to access Deepseek through Deepseek. You can self-host it and your data never leaves your premises.

[wolttam]

I self-host Flash actually, but yeah.

When I use their API I use it knowing that they probably train on the data, and knowing that it's probably used to improve future iterations of their models.

But I use their API extremely rarely lately, because local Flash is good enough for me the vast majority of the time

[rubicon33]

And you’ve opened wireshark and verified the model is sending absolutely nothing? Not caching and sending later, etc?

[adrian_b]

If you self host then you can audit the open-source llama.cpp or whichever other program you are using for inference, to see exactly what it does, and also whichever open-source harness you use for implementing a coding assistant or other agentic workflow.

The model consists of a bunch of data files, it does absolutely nothing by itself.

If you run inference on your own hardware, you have absolute control on how the LLM is used, not like when you use an external service provider.

[razemio]

Not sure if you mean something else, but the model itself is not able to send anything.

[kzrdude]

You can use deepseek through opencode, which says its providers have a no-retention policy.

[BeetleB]

They frustratingly don't tell you who the providers are.

[127]

DeepSeek V4 Pro is only ~3-4x as expensive as Flash. It won't replace GPT-5.5 (nowhere near) but I've been using the $20 sub to punch through tough cases and use Pro for rest.

[RALaBarge]

It’s my daily driver in opencode

[ai_fry_ur_brain]

Deepseek V4 flash is actually useless. Sorry I've tested it after seeing so many comments like these. On Open router when trying to get it to output tool calls for creating tables, instead of providing the structured output correctly it was sending me peoples dropbox links and other image sharing site urls that led to pictures of random tables...

Llms seem to only impress a certain type of person. Hint, this type of person also was really excited about NFTs.

[paxys]

Unless you are hosting it yourself on your own infrastructure it absolutely can be taken away.

[atherton94027]

For all intents and purposes you'll be able to move an open weight model wherever you want.

I really dislike this rhetoric, you sound like the FSF guys who are like "you're not free until you're running coreboot with zero binary blobs". Sure they have a point but also, most people are fine running regular linux.

[salviati]

Reading your comment made me realize that I love that the position of the FSF is held by someone, in the interest of stretching the Overton Window to that side.

[tonyarkles]

Very much with you on that. It’s not a position I personally hold by any means, but I appreciate its existence connected to a prominent long-standing organization.

[adrianN]

Most FSF guys actually have very nuanced views on the topic and you’re doing everyone a disservice by reducing it to an extremist sound bite.

[jjmarr]

That's literally the official FSF position.

https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw

> For example: the Free Software Foundation only purchases desktop machines which support Libreboot, and Thinkpad X200 and X60 laptops with Libreboot. All desktops and servers we buy are KGPE-D16 motherboards, which are supported by Libreboot. As a result, all of the workstations used by the FSF staff have a free BIOS.

https://www.gnu.org/distros/common-distros.html

> Except where noted, all of the distributions listed on this page fail to follow the guidelines in at least two important ways:

> ...The kernel that they distribute (in most cases, Linux) includes “blobs”: pieces of object code distributed without source, usually firmware to run some device.

They are extreme, uncompromising, and live by their principles.

They are also the reason you can buy a computer meeting those requirements instead of being a pipe dream.

[fouc]

Damn, that's awesome. I suddenly feel like replicating their setup and seeing how it goes.

[flexagoon]

For even more of a challenge, try replicating Richard Stallman's personal setup:

https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

[akoboldfrying]

> They are also the reason you can buy a computer meeting those requirements

The latest libreboot-compatible laptop I could find, at https://libreboot.org/docs/install/t480.html, is from 2018 -- not sure if that would still be available?

[jjmarr]

Technoethical sells a refurbished T400 with GNU Boot.

https://tehnoetic.com/laptops/tet-t400s

Libreboot actually isn't free anymore by FSF standards because it has binary blobs for the Intel Management Engine. Neither is Coreboot which has blobs for many other things. Most modern computers cannot boot without binary blobs for ME, which is why GNU Boot was created.

If you want a modern/new computer, Purism sells them with the management engine "neutralized" but it's still not free by FSF standards because they haven't bypassed it entirely.

https://puri.sm/learn/intel-me/

[ffsm8]

Thankfully he didn't say that they're all like that. Instead he pointed out the few that are as a well known example of similar behavior.

If you reread the comment with a fresh mind you'll notice that you misunderstood what he wrote

[citadel_melon]

When attacking archetypes of people, there is some responsibility to make clear who you’re attacking and why, even to someone who’s not being hyper-open-minded. At least if you want them to learn from you: which may or may not be your goal. When you attack/signal you’re on the offensive, it is foolish to believe that they won’t knee-jerk attack back and become closed minded at least a little.

Regardless, the “misinterpretation” of the parent comment is actually a plausible interpretation. I suspend my judgement on what the actual “correct” interpretation of the original comment is: there are too many plausible interpretations to deductively decide. But I do know that since they first comment brought up a contentious issue, they should have put more work into crafting their message so there aren’t so many plausible interpretations that are contradictory. Or alternatively, they should have specified more precisely who they were talking about without a shadow of a doubt. That is if the commenter cared to be properly interpreted, but that may not be their goal. There are many reasonable reasons why that wouldn’t be their goal.

[verve_rat]

When you read someone's comment there is some responsibility to read the words they wrote and not attempt to attack them for an argument no reasonable person would extract from those words.

[morgoo]

You used a lot of words to defend a strawman argument

[NamlchakKhandro]

Angry girlfriend SMS essay

[charcircuit]

It is the FSF itself who has these extremist views.

[sauwan]

Unless the US Gov bans inference companies from serving Chinese models to US customers...

[tancop]

good luck doing it to inference companies in singapore or the netherlands. or one of the decentralized networks that dont look useful right now. the world is already sick of america acting like it can do whatever and force their rules on the rest of us.

[GTP]

Still, with the same model being served by multiple providers, it is much less likely to disappear entirely, even if you would like to keep using a cloud provider. Worst-case scenario, you change providers. Or you use OpenRouter as a proxy.

[dgellow]

There is actual market competition to host open models. If one provider stops offering a model you likely can find another provider that will

[amunozo]

But you have multiple providers, not just one.

[paxys]

And every single one of those providers would buckle under government pressure.

Fable itself is hosted on all major cloud providers. How many offer it today?

[eli]

This seems a little fanciful.

There's really no comparison between a model that Anthropic allows Google and Amazon to host with one that has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times and has dozens of public inference providers.

[Art9681]

I don't think they "allow" Google or Amazon to host them so much as Anthropic itself is deploying and managing their services on multiple cloud providers just like every other global scale business. Even the models served via OpenRouter are just being routed to compute under Anthropic control. Same with OpenAI. They aren't going to hand the world's most valuable intellectual property at the moment to some third party to run independently.

Now for the Chinese models on OpenRouter, yea. Those providers could be legit. Or it could be a failed crypto mining operation pivoting to providing AI compute. Who knows.

[minimaxir]

The providers on OpenRouter are not all in the US.

[paxys]

That doesn’t mean they are immune to US laws. If they want to continue to operate in the largest market in the world they will fall in line.

And if you are a legit American business you aren’t going to illegally bypass import/export controls.

[svachalek]

More importantly, the download is out there. You can download it yourself today, and if it's that important to you, you can buy the hardware too.

[cyanydeez]

I'm sure he's referring to the tightening of internet controls around social media as an extrapolation to controlling websites, etc.

[logicchains]

Even in that case it can't be taken away; GPT and Claude are banned in China yet there's still a huge black market for tokens.

[theptip]

No. As long as you downloaded the weights, you can run them somewhere.

[GaggiX]

Popular open models on Openrouter have dozens of providers.

[koolala]

No it can't you can take it where ever you want. It is yours not theirs.

[supern0va]

>Unless you're running Linux yourself, it can absolutely be taken away.

[Zambyte]

Yes. The difference is obviously that full, fat Linux runs on a superset of anything a layperson would call a computer, and can be built from source on roughly the same set of hardware. Running the full, fat Deepseek (as in the 1.6T model, unquantized) is too big to run on anything a layperson would call a computer, and being able to actually build it is even harder.

[supern0va]

It's famously difficult to find people willing to rent you time on big computers over the internet.

[Zambyte]

Other people's computers famously can't be taken away.

[supern0va]

You're right, there is an all powerful wizard who can take away all the world's computers. You got me.

There's a reason Yudkowsky only thinks AI can be stopped by literal missile strikes against data centers.

[greenavocado]

I just want personal agency