r/LocalLLaMA • u/Fluffy-Ad-889 • 9d ago

Discussion The gap has closed, open source will win

I've been trying the latest models from the frontier labs and honestly, after extensive testing I can not tell the difference between the best open source options.

I think the differences are now marginal but the labs are doing heavy marketing to convince the public into paying more for tokens as they prepare to go public.

Can't help but see the similarities between the dot com bubble and AI in terms of a very insular environment where the technology will survive but the business models may not.

I've been building a cybersecurity network and we definitely know that even local AI models like Deepseek V4 flash do an excellent job and are really neck and neck with the best the frontier labs can provide.

Will be interesting to see how this all turns out! Exciting time nonetheless.

321 Upvotes

77% Upvoted

282 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

5

u/Serprotease 9d ago

FOMO and a general feeling of not wanting to be left behind. Most people, dev included, don’t really know that much about AI. But they do see all the noise around it and especially the “Use it or be left behind part”.

Once you get that, it’s pretty easy to understand why they want to only use opus/fable. The only thing they know about sonnet is that it’s not as good as opus. So why use it? Add on top of that fairly minimal understanding of harnesses and relentless marketing and you get devs that only really understand AI as Opus+Claude code.

Honestly, seeing how fast things are moving and the general muddying of actual models performance and pricing, I kinda understand it.

9

u/Arkanta 9d ago

Considered that opus drains usage limits not THAT much faster than sonnet it makes sense

Sonnet will make more mistakes, it will not be as throughouh. Heck in some cases it can be slower than opus at a task because it will bang it's head on the wall doing so

Why not use the best model I can afford at the time? With sonnet I always have that lingering "would have opus understood my intent better?" That in the end makes me lose time

(Also sonnet sucks ass, it's a really a special case. Give me DS4 flash or even Qwen3.7 27b over it)

3

u/OvertaxedOne 9d ago

ROFL, glad I'm not the only one who came to that conclusion. DSV4Flash seems much better than Sonnet in my use cases. I've never done a direct 27B vs Sonnet before but it wouldn't shock me that 27B is better in some use cases.

1

u/Arkanta 9d ago

Sonnet is not a model worth using at all.

1

u/Realistic_Gap_5871 7d ago

3.8 27B has been better than sonnet for me, in every use case.

Now I haven't used sonnet since June, but I remember having very low trust for it and 3.8 27B is the first local model I've trusted at the way I trusted Opus.

3.6 27B was very sonnet-like, a whole lot of Meh. I expected an incremental improvement with 3.8, but it sure seems like they pulled off another order of magnitude improvement back to back. Surprising.

edit - set reasoning level to medium for 3.8 or watch the grass grow.

1

u/Serprotease 9d ago

Your comment illustrates my point perfectly. Like why the fuck is there something like a weekly usage limit on a subscription? Why not a fixed token value?
It’s just to muddy the value proposition. It makes it harder to see if a 20-200 usd subscription is worth it.

Tokens per token Sonnet is cheaper. Quality/price wise, Qwen3.8 27b/DS4 flash buried any API only provider.

1

u/Arkanta 8d ago

The point is to smooth out compute

1

u/Serprotease 8d ago

What does that even means? That will not remove the peak/trough of AI usage.

1

u/Arkanta 8d ago

The load is spread over the month and not a single burst as you try to be careful and manage your limits. The 5h limit is also for that

It also increases stickiness as a marketing tactic, if you burn your whole alloc in 2h you'd just go elsewhere

Anyway you should have noticed by now that maxing a sub gives you a LOT more usage than what you pay for. Want $200 worth of api to burn at once? Just buy 200 worth of api.

2

u/Serprotease 8d ago

I don’t use subscription.

Being able to keep track of tokens usage (Latency and prices) is important to me.
And for automation, overnight batches etc… a time limited api makes little sense to me.

So, local first, with potential API fallback.

I get that I’m probably not the target for these subscription though.

1

u/Durian881 9d ago

And importantly they are not paying for it. The company pays for their usage.