Yes I know what the benchmarks say. It does not reflect my experience.
You’re also comparing benchmarks for the full model, but then telling people to run IQ3_S. I found the IQ3_S model to be a substantial step down from 4-6 bit quants.
> You’re also comparing benchmarks for the full model
I wish there were more concrete ways to judge the difference. I've spent a bunch of time using 3 and 4 bit versions of qwen 27b, and my conclusion was that the lower qaunt made more mistakes - but that both systems were able to recover from those mistakes in a coding context. I'm not sure if that holds across the board, but that's the best answer I have so far.
It's also unclear if anthropic always serves you f16 versions of their models. My friends who use claude a lot complain about intelligence that varies from day to day - but that's entirely anecdotal.
If all you do is generate tokens all day, sure, host your own infra. For people that aren’t maxing out hardware, using someone else’s is a pretty economical option. $20 with deepseek flash gets you a LOT of agentic use, and as the frontier moves forward with new models, so do I.
But let's compare apples to almost-apples! Qwen3.8 flash next is $0.47/M on openrouter, so $2.44 per day, so 246 days to break even. I say almost-apples because on this $600 system we're running an IQ3_S quantization. The hosted model is running... nobody knows what quant. It probably varies bases on the time of day.