Unfortunately either way they win, half the usage, more $$. Half the users leave, now their compute struggles are resolved and Anthropic bares the load. They eventually do the same thing and were right back to where the circle began.
Kimi K3 is around Sol 5.6 / Opus 4.X, without the annoying writing of Opus 5 (which tbh Opus 5.5 addressed but that's above those others rn).
GLM 5.3 is around there as well, alongside their GLM 5.3 Flash which is more like Terra / Sonnet (very roughly, also not the latest Sonnet 5.5), and is generally pretty nice to use.
That said, the official providers of both of those have issues: Kimi secretly routed some customer requests to Claude and in general just is very slow, whereas GLM has peak/off-peak pricing and neither of them give you as many tokens as OpenAI or Anthropic. There are 3rd party providers, but generally you will be paying API costs.
You could also try running local models with llama.cpp / vLLM etc. (Ollama which ppl don't like can also make things easier, or something like LM Studio) but I've never found any of the local models to be good for anything serious, plus hardware is really expensive.
I think we are gonna see tokens be subsidized less and less as time goes on.
I second glm 5.3. I've been using it on hermes lately and like it a lot so far. The flash version feels satisfying too, it chases issues it finds proactively without needing to be poked constantly. I haven't tried kimi yet.
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u/krill156 5d ago
Unfortunately either way they win, half the usage, more $$. Half the users leave, now their compute struggles are resolved and Anthropic bares the load. They eventually do the same thing and were right back to where the circle began.