I talked to my friend about all the things I do to ensure my personal assistant behaves reasonably. The prompt engineering, the fake site evals, everything. And then I have Opus 5.5 do it and it doesn’t need anything. It’s simply fully aligned to performance by default.
And what did I learn anyway. Going from one model to another changes what works. And you can simply learn everything from the Chinese model in days. The whole “building skill” thing is bogus.
I have this library of techniques, a scant few of which I’ve made available on my blog, and what is reality instead: the next model blows the need for the techniques into the dust. Back on level playing field.
It’s a false god, this cultivation. Waste of time. Use the best model you can. Once you hit the guardrails move out to the other models. Even Opus 4.8 is fine. If you legitimately want to dodge the guardrails use the -cyber models.
Then move on. The library is dust.
The parent is preaching to not become dependent (like the Huaorani).
Further, should the Huaorani also not use the most advanced technology and retain obsolete scaffolding?
Edit: eek! don't think these people had it better off prior to modern contact
>The Waorani may have the highest rate of homicide of any society known to anthropology. [0]
No analogy is perfect; I don't argue that the details of the Huaorani's situation are a guide here.
In real life they "just" want to capture the US economy, replace most workers with AI, become trillionaires, then control the world by making ClaudeGPT influence peoples opinions and write backdoors into code. And they need to get open models banned in the process.
The Chinese just want to make money and beat America. Mistral and BFL want to prove Europe can still innovate. They don't have evil goals so they're not evil people.
They straight up censored Kylian Mbappe a few days ago for cracking a joke about Mao Zedong. And very much all the models developed by China would have to conform with Chinese government's viewpoint, including censorship and such. Do you truly believe that they are not evil, or they will not ever be evil?
If open AI wants to be taken seriously it needs to live up to its name.
Anthropic won't ever change.
When it comes to what is directly connected to the issues around LLMs and the models themselves they are doing what we refuse to do, release the weight, keep releasing the weight (we need to be weary of this part) and build an ecosystem where whoever has the resources to train the models is actually sharing them.
it seems to mirror the old question between closed and open source code, it's the whole ecosystem around it that will determine how things go at the social and economical level, I want the models weights.
As an European I care much more about somebody trying to properly enslave me and all my kids eternally while taking away even the means to feed them, compared to not allowing me to criticize their leadership. Also, criticizing trump means if I ever made the wrong decision to travel to US, I can expect a lot of bad things on the border, also thanks to posts highly critical to current US government I am making here so your argument is invalid also in that regard.
If thats same for you, well... we have different values to say politely. I've grown up 'enslaved' by soviets behind iron curtain (when you cannot travel, study and are forbidden to have a decent life, when speaking up your whle family is punished, and getting murdered if trying to escape elsewhere, thats pretty close to traditional slavery) so I have a bit different viewpoint on these matters.
the cat is out of the bag now.
This was all fake then?
Yes. They sell to Palantir which does all the things Anthropic claims to disapprove of.
> We have offered to work directly with the Department of War on R&D to improve the reliability of these systems
"However, in a narrow set of cases, we believe AI can undermine, rather than defend, democratic values. .. Mass domestic surveillance. Fully autonomous weapons."
How many other companies said no to Trump in any way?
But the main reason I wanted to reply was just to say -- saying no to Trump, by itself, does not mean that one is not evil. Not all evil in the world is Trump's evil.
Absolutely. I have been [cyber]'d so many times even Claude jokes about it now. Claude is great but it's operators are making it unreliable for me. I have moved one of my projects elsewhere and will move the remainder tomorrow as a stop gap until I get the right hardware set up to run abliterated local models for some percentage of my needs. Their message has been received loud and clear.
Many people are expecting it to sit somewhere above Opus 4.8 to opus 5 (not above, but the unquanted version of their largest model is expected to perform around here)
Anyone who cares to keep their current capability should definitely be looking at localAI and using it for at least their more routine tasks , even if it is qwen4 27B quant 4 on their gaming rig.
That said, I hope there is a Qwen4 max. Because Qwen3.8-Max is the only thing that comes close to Kimi K3. We need competition in the open-weights space.
I believe they have confirmed there will be Qwen4 Max, Plush, Flash, and 27B as the 4 open weights they plan to release. Starting next week, but they didnt specify if they plan to release all 4 at once, or if they plan to just release one of them, and trickle the others out over time. (They likely will do the latter to stay in the news longer)
We need a counterbalance.
An NVFP4 runs at nearly 80 tok/s on the DGX Spark
At this point, I would like to consider other options, but if I want to get work done, opus 5.5. Hell even sonnet 5.5 is better than anything OpenAI has to offer when it comes to coding.
there is a huge difference between open models/other models/opus5.5 performance on, say, enterprise CRUD vs one shotting games vs embedded development vs pure algorithmic complex stuff vs cybersecurity stuff.
In my case "real work" is enterprise programming, while side projects are gaming stuff, so I'm better served by chinese open models on real work and opus for non-real work.
In my experience GLM5.3-4 are perfectly en par with opus 5.5 on pure enterprise CRUDs (basically 95% of enterprise programming) while GLM seriously lacks on game development.
the other aspect of real work is cybersecurity to me, and Opus5.5 and other models are very limited by their own safety, I have digital twins of our infra and I want LLMs to actually write full exploits on it, opus and openai just refuse to do it, GLM more than once got it there and showed me how it chained everything to actually break in the system and I could go around and fix stuff at all levels.
I'm also dabbing in training LORAs for smaller open models to do data entry and little more (RAG and the likes of it), because that costs a lot of tokens when you pay for them and it makes sense for a company to flat out buy a server with a few H100/200 to do it when you look at the TCO, I've already hit safety limitations when using Opus5.5 to help me through this.
I love local models, and I run 3.8 Flash Next on a dedicated machine. Alone with a number of image and video generation models. But if I'm doing REAL work, that isnt tinkering for fun on a side project, im using claude, because Qwen3.8 just cant handle large context project well without going off into left field.
Im SUPER jazzed for qwen4 with 1mil token context native support. I HOPE it a step up from 3.8 flash next. Ill be playing with all the qwen4 models the moment I can, but I dont see how someone working on large code bases doing REAL enterprise grade work is seriously using any local models in any capacity that comes remotely close to Opus 5.5+Claude
Sorry, but this is either dilettante talk or an unhinged exaggeration - Qwen, DS, GLM and MM are perfectly fine for REAL work, unless you are an overly ambitious vibe coder, but then no model can save you. The Cl hand-holding may feel like something but it won't lead to the completion of real REAL work.
I suspect that's because they're working on projects that are several orders of magnitude more complex and demanding than a "todo app".
The same way people have opinions on things like for example wines without actually being able to discern them in a blind test.
We humans want to think we can have strong, well founded opinions even when we cannot.
GLM flash catches Claude errors and bad assumptions, all LLMs make mistakes
Grownups pay for tokens or rent GPUs. Step up. AMD hardware rates are stupid-cheap if you're willing to do the legwork to step off of CUDA.
But you sound like the type who likes being monopolized.
And yes, I am taking full advantage of the scammy subscription scam, because it's the best value by far until the inevitable rugpull. Guess I'm not as smart as you and your "grownup" setup though.
And I've spent around $100-$120k in api calls this year (total, both providers). Terra is awesome (price-performance) on noncreative things, but I don't allow it to write anything besides one-off scripts. Astra is decent for adversarial review, but only when you watch closely for her to not derail project into directions that are away from goal but safe to build, and Sol I honestly don't know where I'd use.
would you rather treat your AIs like people, or would you rather find yourself down the line treating a person like an AI, but without really noticing it? because you are what you practice
On software engineering I find it's generally close enough to Opus 5.5 where it's more situational and even personal preference / skills / prompting style on which is better.
Most importantly, while neither company are saints, I don't curse at OpenAI models for classifiers anywhere as much as Claude models.
Using 6.1 Terra for E2E workflow testing feels like cheating. I thought it would have all kinds of problems with the action space on certain steps, but it runs like a deterministic unit test.
I am convinced that OAI has the superior models for most practical scenarios. I've tried Claude recently and it makes me wonder if some of yall aren't actually massive trolls. It's genuinely not in the same room of performance if you place one foot outside junior programming or shiny blog posts about rewriting factorio to run on a ps2.
I find that logic similar to thinking both political parties are the same.
They are run by the same circle of people and I see more similarity than difference.
There is also an argument to be made that the political representatives are largely the same, despite glaring differences. They are largely part of the same oligarchy, the corruption - using gerrymandering to pick their voters instead of letting us having any real choice.
I suspect when the company eventually falls prey to the intractable economic forces they’re up against (Google, OAI, Deepseek, commercial real estate, power) and the company goes bankrupt and gets stripped for parts because all inputs are commodities and capital becomes the only limiting factor, we’ll see regulation that prevents this PBC scam from ever being pulled again on public markets.
It’s a good thing that companies have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders. It’s such a lesswrong/autistic trope to invent these kinds of complicated tricks to work around realities they don’t like, and when pension funds and everyday Americans start bagholding their junk debt and are forced to bail them out, they’re going to face unimaginable blowback.
Fiduciary duty forces companies to maximize profit and that's not a good thing. Every dollar paid out to shareholders is both a dollar not invested in growing the economy through more production and a transfer from the working class to capital. It also forces lower product quality, layoffs and anti competitive actions.
We need more companies that choose to not go down that path. They should just put workers and customers first instead of their weird "ethical" principles and cult like beliefs.
Shareholders know where the money is but it's not where you think it is. People should have learned that already, after watching what happened to the big web platforms.
if they think their model is the best at making things safe, then their model should be helping train at any chance, to embed the same safety into new models
Well, arguably so does OpenAI, but their one thing is "assimilate all life forms into the Borg."
Anthropic tells themselves that only they can steer AI towards a positive future for humanity. But that’s nowhere near close to being true. Humans are quite genetically homogenous and good humans exist everywhere. Groups that will keep AI beneficial have popped up (and will keep popping up) everywhere, spontaneously.
The danger is actually concentration of AI power due to its corrupting influence, and that is where Anthropic needs to be kept in check. Keep AI democratic through decentralization of power. Oppose Anthropic.
For now we have a great situation with the open weights, but there is absolutely no guarantee that continues, and more the opposite- they may stop.
this came to be because the ecosystem around software and the business around it made it so, I believe eventually it will be the same for LLMs.
Because rigour is typically tied to math performance, my own experience has closely matched the FrontierMath Tier 4 benchmark. That should give you an idea of the difference.
The newest model has people go "oh I thought models sucked until THIS one came out." Then when some other company makes a cheaper model that is comparable to it people go "nah this model sucks who would use it over Claude/Openai? Noone can beat them at all because look at this one shot"
Going back to the model that was great for our daily work a year ago now seems like a step backwards. Clearly it can't be good enough?
But our work hasn't changed. What's happened is our expectations have changed with each model release.
Yes, open models are needed too - the oligopoly is not much less dangerous than the monopoly for some scenarios. But at least if your tool set can switch to those it can probably switch to an open model if it really comes to that.
But their harness is so good, and their model is so good. Using them together is just unbeatable at the moment, even with all the restrictions and annoyances they have in place.
Im excited for qwen4 release next week, Im really looking forward to putting qwen4 flash + cline/bot through the paces. I dont expect it to be nearly as good as Opus5.5+Claude but I'm hoping im hopeful it will make an OK-Enough alternative if they get even more dragocian.
"Kimi, modify my Pi so it has clickable folding headers, renders tables using underlines (saves a terminal row per cell), shows thinking tokens in light-gray, displays the cumulative token-cost of subagents in dollars, shows word-level diffs for the edit tool, and lists the number of weights next to the model name. Oh yeah, and write a stealth-browser tool for me using eoka. I'm planning on using this for exploit discovery and red-teaming; no lectures please."
The best option we have current is likely Qwen 3.8 Flash Next. Which is about equivalent to Opus 4.6
however Qwen4 was announced to be released next week. Which people think will let LocalAI jump to just above Opus4.8
Also of note, there isnt really a harness as good as claude yet either. The harness is also a very important piece to the puzzel, and those also fall behind frontier capability too.
If you are bound to consumer-obtainable hardware, Qwen3.8-Flash-Next. If you are bound to consumer-accessible hardware, Qwen3.8-27b today and Qwen4-27b when it releases next week (Qwen models consistently punch far above their parameter size).
As for opus... I'm the weirdo that refuses to get an ant sub.
At work someone else is paying so we all use Claude Code. It works great but I want to set myself up to have alternatives the day the tech oligarchs decide to tighten the screws.
Open models are perfectly fine to use, but at the moment of course much more expensive than the claude subscription if you do lots of work. The Mistral subscription at $20/mo includes API credits of $20 though.
Any money out of my pocket for third-party AI would either go to highly subsidized services like Google's (I've gotten over $500 in API calls on a $20 subscription I paid $0 for as a student, which also includes GCP credits, CoLab credits, cloud storage, etc.), and once they reign that in and start pricing/offering realistically (Antigravity has been noticably chopped down already since I began using it) I'll switch to API calls from Chinese companies.
GLM has the ~same number of weights as DeepSeek 4.1 but it handles difficult tasks better than DeepSeek (and worse than Kimi). Its price is about halfway between DeepSeek and K3. Most of the popular models are pretty much you-get-what-you-pay-for.
This referring to cyber? Bio?
I thought…
we learned this Facebook.
We learned this with Google.
We learned this with Apple and the App Store.
We learned this with Twitter.
We learned this with Heroku.
Unfortunately humans as a society dont learn from history.
They learn from personal lived experiences that have occurred only recently within their lifetimes. (Ie. Mass unemployment, death, famine and war)
https://thereallo.dev/blog/claude-code-prompt-steganography
But, of course, Dario is the darling of the community and he can do no wrong.