This is free... as in you can download it, run it on your systems and finetune it to be the way you want it to be.
In theory, sure, but as other have pointed out you need to spend half a million on GPUs just to get enough VRAM to fit a single instance of the model. And you’d better make sure your use case makes full 24/7 use of all that rapidly-depreciating hardware you just spent all your money on, otherwise your actual cost per token will be much higher than you think.
In practice you will get better value from just buying tokens from a third party whose business is hosting open weight models as efficiently as possible and who make full use of their hardware. Even with the small margin they charge on top you will still come out ahead.
And that GPU wouldn’t run one instance, the models are highly parallelizable. It would likely support 10-15 users at once, if a company oversubscribed 10:1 that GPU supports ~100 seats. Amortized over a couple years the costs are competitive.
Obviously, and certainly companies do run their own models because they place some value on data sovereignty for regulatory or compliance or other reasons. (Although the framing that Anthropic or OpenAI might "steal their data" is a bit alarmist - plenty of companies, including some with _highly_ sensitive data, have contracts with Anthropic or OpenAI that say they can't train future models on the data they send them and are perfectly happy to send data to Claude. You may think they're stupid to do that, but that's just your opinion.)
> the models are highly parallelizable. It would likely support 10-15 users at once.
Yes, I know that; I understand LLM internals pretty well. One instance of the model in the sense of one set of weights loaded across X number of GPUs; of course you can then run batch inference on those weights, up to the limits of GPU bandwidth and compute.
But are those 100 users you have on your own GPUs usings the GPUs evenly across the 24 hours of the day, or are they only using them during 9-5 in some timezone? If so, you're leaving your expensive hardware idle for 2/3 of the day and the third party providers hosting open weight models will still beat you on costs, even without getting into other factors like they bought their GPUs cheaper than you did. Do the math if you don't believe me.
The most significant value of open source models come from being able to fine-tune; with a good dataset and limited scope; a finetune can be crazily worth it.
Now, at the moment, i can still use 4.6 but eventually Anthropic are going to remove it, and when it's gone it will be gone forever. I'm planning on trying Deepseek v4, because even if it's not quite as good, I know that it will be available forever, I'll always be able to find someone to run it.
Already these models are useful for a myriad of use cases. It's really not that important if a model can 1-shot a particular problem or draw a cuter pelican on a bike. Past a degree of quality, process and reliability are so much more important for anything other than complete hands-off usage, which in business it's not something you're really going to do.
The fact that my tool may be gone tomorrow, and this actually has happened before, with no guarantees of a proper substitute... that's a lot more of a concern than a point extra in some benchmark.
If you want to go budget corporate, 7 x H200 is just barely going to run it, but all in, $300k ought to do it.
- To run at full precision: "16–24 H100s", giving us ~$400-600k upfront, or $8-12/h from [us-east-1](https://intuitionlabs.ai/articles/h100-rental-prices-cloud-c...).
- To run with "heavy quantization" (16 bits -> 8): "8xH100", giving us $200K upfront and $4/h.
- To run truly "locally"--i.e. in a house instead of a data center--you'd need four 4090s, one of the most powerful consumer GPUs available. Even that would clock in around $15k for the cards alone and ~$0.22/h for the electricity (in the US).
Truly an insane industry. This is a good reminder of why datacenter capex from since 2023 has eclipsed the Manhattan Project, the Apollo program, and the US interstate system combined...
10 years from now that hardware will be on eBay for any geek with a couple thousand dollars and enough power to run it.
"671B total / 37B active"
"Full precision (BF16)"
And they claim they ran this non-existent model on vLLM and SGLang over a month and a half ago.
It's clickbait keyword slop filled in with V3 specs. Most of the web is slop like this now. Sigh.
It's about 2 months behind GPT 5.5 and Opus 4.7.
As long as it is cheap to run for the hosting providers and it is frontier level, it is a very competitive model and impressive against the others. I give it 2 years maximum for consumer hardware to run models that are 500B - 800B quantized on their machines.
It should be obvious now why Anthropic really doesn't want you to run local models on your machine.
Doesn't mean Deepseek v4 isn't great, just benchmarks alone aren't enough to tell.