4 ms·

Okay so if this model is half a year behind, so let’s say January opus pre-nerf, this is it. Inference is actually quite cheap for token costs, the frontier la

Okay so if this model is half a year behind, so let’s say January opus pre-nerf, this is it. Inference is actually quite cheap for token costs, the frontier labs burn most of their money on training new models, priced into their token costs ontop of some margins and paying record salaries. So if this goes open, distills are tried out, independent providers around the world host it with actual price competition, the house of cards for anthropic collapses pre-ipo. The floor is opus (open models caught up), the current ceiling is Mythos (self inflicted ban due to the safety bullshit theater), and no way out. It’s really comical I think it’s even the same guy that warned about gpt2 being too dangerous to release, well that mindset seems to now doing existential harm to anthropic, while the rest of the world essentially laughs and progresses anyway.

taffydavid 3mo ago
Gpt2 was too dangerous to release. We just don't see it yet. Sure, the model itself was harmless, but it lit the fuse
- vermilingua 3mo ago
  Actually many of us do see that, and have been saying so for some time now.
  - sigmoid10 3mo ago
    I worked in this field since long before LLMs. Nobody outside of the field really cared about GPT2, and even insiders knew the "too dangerous" part was a PR gag at best and the first dig of the moat at worst. After all, they released smaller versions of it along with detailed instructions on training it in the paper, so anyone with a lot of compute and a bunch of internet scrapers could try to recreate it. But basically noone did, even though it would have only cost ~50k back then (and less than 3k today). A few normal users started to take notice with GPT 3, but even then it was super limited. Even instructGPT didn't cause real shockwaves, despite being very close to the final product. Only ChatGPT/3.5 finally lit the fuse and people suddenly cared about having this too.
    - zhshshshs 3mo ago
      Since we’re doing anecdotes I definitely agree GPT2 lit the fuse. It woke up a sizable chunk of people paying attention. GPT3 is when I and many others got into a full blown existential crisis - it was the bang after the fuse. Then we got a long tail of laggards and people without vision. Even today you can find a significant chunk of folks in denial still.
  - taffydavid 3mo ago
    fair point
abustamam 3mo ago
Is it going to actually be open source or just open weights? I'm looking forward to trying this with opencode regardless!
pixlmint 3mo ago
Quit my Claude pro subscription last week and purchased credits for an API inference provider. I think I might even end up saving money, since I really don’t use AI that much, and I actually found that gemma4:31b is fine for most of my non-coding inquiries.
- sigmoid10 3mo ago
  Gemma is amazing with tools for anything that is not crazy complex. I think a lot of people have a wrong perception of it because Google's new prompt format broke implementations like llama.cpp and it took quite a while to get everything sorted. But even the tiny variants running on edge devices are surprisingly capable when used right. The frontier will probably keep moving for a while, but it will be increasingly disconnected from normal human use. In the future, if you're not trying to solve a research level math problem, you'll probably do it locally and fully privately. Which also means the payday when they will fundamentally no longer be able to reach a billion users with frontier models will come soon for the labs. Even if they do get their IPO out, it will probably crash and burn at current valuations.
  - user43928 3mo ago
    Do you guys actually work with these models? I have to use GPT 5.4 Mini at work. It benchmarks higher than that Gemma 4 model. In my experience it's next to useless. It cannot even move 20 existing lines of code from A to B without breaking them half of the time. If you tell it to look something up in your dependencies, it's 50/50 on whether the answer is correct, incorrect, or it simply didn't perform the search at all. I find it next to useless, and I'm mostly better off doing the work manually. It's a night and day difference to even Sonnet, not to mention the SOTA.
    - gnaritas99 3mo ago
      [dead]
    - pixlmint 3mo ago
      “Moving lines of code” is a very peculiar eval tbh. I’ve never used Gemma for agentic tasks, but did have it write code, including multi-turn, and I was very positively surprised how well it performed.

taffydavid 3mo ago

Gpt2 was too dangerous to release. We just don't see it yet. Sure, the model itself was harmless, but it lit the fuse

vermilingua 3mo ago
Actually many of us do see that, and have been saying so for some time now.
- sigmoid10 3mo ago
  I worked in this field since long before LLMs. Nobody outside of the field really cared about GPT2, and even insiders knew the "too dangerous" part was a PR gag at best and the first dig of the moat at worst. After all, they released smaller versions of it along with detailed instructions on training it in the paper, so anyone with a lot of compute and a bunch of internet scrapers could try to recreate it. But basically noone did, even though it would have only cost ~50k back then (and less than 3k today). A few normal users started to take notice with GPT 3, but even then it was super limited. Even instructGPT didn't cause real shockwaves, despite being very close to the final product. Only ChatGPT/3.5 finally lit the fuse and people suddenly cared about having this too.
  - zhshshshs 3mo ago
    Since we’re doing anecdotes I definitely agree GPT2 lit the fuse. It woke up a sizable chunk of people paying attention. GPT3 is when I and many others got into a full blown existential crisis - it was the bang after the fuse. Then we got a long tail of laggards and people without vision. Even today you can find a significant chunk of folks in denial still.
- taffydavid 3mo ago
  fair point

abustamam 3mo ago

Is it going to actually be open source or just open weights? I'm looking forward to trying this with opencode regardless!

pixlmint 3mo ago

Quit my Claude pro subscription last week and purchased credits for an API inference provider. I think I might even end up saving money, since I really don’t use AI that much, and I actually found that gemma4:31b is fine for most of my non-coding inquiries.

sigmoid10 3mo ago
Gemma is amazing with tools for anything that is not crazy complex. I think a lot of people have a wrong perception of it because Google's new prompt format broke implementations like llama.cpp and it took quite a while to get everything sorted. But even the tiny variants running on edge devices are surprisingly capable when used right. The frontier will probably keep moving for a while, but it will be increasingly disconnected from normal human use. In the future, if you're not trying to solve a research level math problem, you'll probably do it locally and fully privately. Which also means the payday when they will fundamentally no longer be able to reach a billion users with frontier models will come soon for the labs. Even if they do get their IPO out, it will probably crash and burn at current valuations.
- user43928 3mo ago
  Do you guys actually work with these models? I have to use GPT 5.4 Mini at work. It benchmarks higher than that Gemma 4 model. In my experience it's next to useless. It cannot even move 20 existing lines of code from A to B without breaking them half of the time. If you tell it to look something up in your dependencies, it's 50/50 on whether the answer is correct, incorrect, or it simply didn't perform the search at all. I find it next to useless, and I'm mostly better off doing the work manually. It's a night and day difference to even Sonnet, not to mention the SOTA.
  - gnaritas99 3mo ago
    [dead]
  - pixlmint 3mo ago
    “Moving lines of code” is a very peculiar eval tbh. I’ve never used Gemma for agentic tasks, but did have it write code, including multi-turn, and I was very positively surprised how well it performed.