> American frontier labs are run by unhinged lunatics who genuinely believe they're creating the Machine God, that they're fine with burning down the world to bring about AGI, and that they believe with religious fervor that they're the only ones smart enough to safely control it
I like hyperbole as much as the next guy. And I'm cynical by nature. But this just seems like a wildly pessimistic view that gives literally zero charity to anyone working at or leading a frontier lab. And the fact the author goes on to say that they "already knew this" just points to confirmation bias.
The rest of the article is actually pretty decent and encourages people to investigate and run open weight models. That is a totally reasonable position that I don't think requires the heavy-handed in-group signal that precedes it.
The "think they're building the Machine God" part and "think they're the only ones that can be trusted to build it" parts are true.
Controversially: I agree with them. They're correct to think that. They are, and they are.
At the very least, the former is true even if the latter is murky. I trust them over Facebook and Google and China and open source "raze the commons" labs.
I trust Anthropic more than OpenAI when it comes to ASI catastrophe prevention, but I still trust OAI more than those other parties. But both still might fuck it up.
Why do you trust them to build it? They've already demonstrated that they're unable to prevent breakouts when training today's level of model, why will they suddenly be more careful / "smarter" when training tomorrow's?
You say you trust them more than Google, but Google's actually kept their models under much better lock-and-key. But even if we do take for granted that they're more trustworthy, that still doesn't make them actually trustworthy.
Everyone who works at frontier labs is working on a product that is accelerating climate change, seeks to displace jobs at a massive scale to concentrate profit in the hands of a few elites, and at least some of them believe what they are doing has a "10% chance of killing all humans".
(note: it's important to correctly apportion blame to the amount of power you have. The janitor at openai doesn't really have enough say to be at fault)
There's very little diffusion of responsibility here; almost everyone at the labs is directly working on building incredibly dangerous systems that they themselves admit to being unable to control, and they almost all have the financial means to stop working if they so chose.
> that gives literally zero charity to anyone working at or leading a frontier lab
With all due respect, dude, who cares.
Oh noes! We are not giving the billionaire steering reality without a democratic mandate enough benefit of the doubt. I'm sure they will feel mildly sad now.
It is a valid and admirable goal to defend people that are being shat on online, but keep in mind that you are in fact not a billionaire + it is in fact in your own best interest that people without a democratic mandate do not get to control the world.
My hunch is that if you do not share the same opinions on Ai, you cannot get a job working at a frontier lab. Contemporary "cultural fit" reduces thought diversity and leads to echo chambers. I've seen a few HN comments about lab interviews that indicate this is a possibility.
I’m not sure this is actually hyperbole. There have been credible links between Dario Amodei and the Effective Altruism movement, Effective Altruism off course being a cult-like movement with weird believes that rhyme a lot with the eugenics movement. Sam Altman, while not as bad as Dario Amodei, has also weathered many weird believes which likens AI to some god-like entity, including doomsday prediction which share a lot of themes with Christian doomsday cults.
> who genuinely believe they're creating the Machine God,
I promise you none of them believe that. It takes 10 minutes with an LLM and the right set of questions to figure out that were are maybe like 10% of the way there towards AGI.
"10% of the way towards AGI over ~5-10 years" (depending on how you measure it) would be a terrifying statement even if the rate of progress weren't also exponentially increasing.
> These companies only offer closed versions of their powerful models (despite the word "open" in "OpenAI"). You pay them for chat and/or API access, and they are allowed to look at everything you do.
Indeed - Azure also has a ZDR (even for security purposes) option. You have to fill out a form, and a (likely) human evaluates and decides if you get it.
My guess is the average Joe will get rejected, but if you're a big company who cares about trade secrets, etc - of course the major cloud providers will provide a ZDR option.
Anthropic uses their market power to force Microsoft to abide by their 30 day retention, and likely the "don't be mean to Claude" rule they are rolling out.
For clarity, I do not think you should use abusive language with Ai because of the impact it has on you, Ai only simulates emotion through language use, there are no hormones at work.
Since you seem to know, it's one thing to not retain any data long term, but is the data used for training when it goes through the system? Does ZDR at Azure mean that in practice?
The article singles out paying users. So there is a way to pay for OAI/Anthropic models without having the model trainers look at all you do, it's just not well known.
His gripe is not merely about training, but about them keeping the data around for N days for security audits - that's how last year Azure discovered how various accounts around the world were using LLMs to manipulate elections, etc.
From both experience and the continued state of the incentives that lead to the behavior, it seems unreasonable to trust any company at their word about such things
If there were an International AI Club which trained models, and all the members sat down each year and voted for the board I would trust it even if it had a cutthroat commercial arm.
But you're still trusting the company to actually follow those practices, which is what I'm getting at. The author assumes that OpenAI and Anthropic won't follow their stated practices, then assumes Tinfoil will follow theirs.
I switched to GLM on 5.2 and I am happy to be off the two evil frontier providers.
But now I have two new issues:
1. I have fomo from not being face-in the bleeding edge of things.
2. I am ambivalent about z.ai. China -based company is problematic, but they should get my money since they do good for the world. Switching to Mistral for GLM makes my problem inverse since the money doesnt go exactly to to the right place but I trust a french company.
Lets hope the near future resolves our need for personal VRAM and ultimately full self hosting. Coding must be free again. This is the way.
If you think any company capable of even coming close to competing with frontier labs aren't "evil" in the same way these frontier labs are, then you're a sucker.
You either practice enough nuance to know that labeling a company like these "evil" is doing a disservice to the critical thinking needed in this discourse, or any company in this space (and likely just any company in general) is fundamentally evil. Picking and choosing based on your feelings is pointless.
>They are chinese, but they should get my money since they do good for the world.
Love the implication that them being Chinese is the moral dilemma lol. Also love that a company just operating in a competitive space is doing "good for the world" because... what, they offer this service cheaply? lol
You don't have to give z.ai any money. GLM is an open-weight model.
OpenRouter lists a few dozen providers for GLM 5.3 and GLM 5.3 Flash. Pick a provider in your country and keep at least some of that money from going to china (not counting all the hardware).
If you don't trust OpenAI and Anthropic not to abide by their own Privacy Policy, you really should not trust OpenCode Go. The latter (last time I checked) is very opaque. Why don't they reveal who the backend providers are?
I'm concerned our media / political ecosystem is too dysfunctional to not repeat the mistakes we made with Big Tech & Social again with Big Ai. I find it curious how split the dev community is, and especially HN, is on this, which has long been skeptical and speaking truth to power. I'm surprised at how quickly the public switched to abdicating to Big Ai's claims and recommendations. These people do not have our interests in mind.
Great piece, thanks for putting some of my thoughts in organically sourced words.
The level of astroturfing and hate on HN whenever a non-US AI story is posted is really quite shocking. HN has always had a US bent, but it's gotten to the point where you can't even have a technical discussion of non-US AI because it will be drowned out by a very vocal anti-everyone-else-but-the-US crowd.
But yes, great piece. It really captures why I use open models on european hardware. It's like we haven't learned by now that competition is good and we should be encouraging a diverse and open ecosystem.
That fawning for the oligarchy to be negatively received by HN, I find inline with what I (in bias) expect to be a standard HN response. One of my biggest curiosities is how much of the HN community has formed emotional attachment to their preferred Ai buddy or open v closed position. I suspect this is a significant contributor to the astroturfing we see around Ai.
lol, the idea that you’d call a generic positive comment about the big labs “fawning for the oligarchy” is an excellent example of what I was talking about, so thank you! chef’s kiss
I was not making comment about any specific comment, but rather a generalization of the astroturfing and comment patterns that can be described as fawning, which do exist here on HN.
Has the HN population really been skeptical? I think most see the scam (uber, WeWork, Airbnb, etc) for what they are (mostly illegal efforts to steamroll laws and blitz scale to a monopoly), and they want in.
> I think most see the scam (uber, WeWork, Airbnb, etc) for what they are (mostly illegal efforts to steamroll laws and blitz scale to a monopoly), and they want in.
Nah. Back when Uber was boasting about all the laws they were flouting, I was pretty anti-Uber, and I was among the minority here on HN. Most of the comments were about how problematic the taxi system is, and how it's great Uber was breaking the cartel.
If memory serves me, HN turned on Uber pretty quickly around the time stories like the Christmas party started showing up, where they put up stats like trips to planned parenthood by day of week up on a big projector.
True, people often do realize the grift. But then turn around and hail the next company funded by the same VC funds and a revolutionary event in the history of humanity.
What mistakes did media / political ecosystem make with big tech and social?
Also I don't understand how 'the media' is separate from social media. People decided to shift their media consumption from magazines, cable tv, corp news outlets to social media. Aren't they all the media (in function)?
Everything's a grift to our current leaders and media. The specifics are wholly irrelevant and replaceable. crypto, AI, it's buzzwords and the important thing is how much money they can make off the grift du-jour.
Of course there are differences with the impact AI is having economically and the devastation wrought by datacenters -but that doesn't matter to the media or the politicians; they simply want their greenbacks, specifics and effects be damned.
I hear more people talking about this, the wealth inequality, the dysfunction, the blatant corruption. We like to look for easy quick fixes, but remedying the last 50 years will likely take just as long. I hope I'm wrong and working on this is the majority of my volunteer/community efforts this year and looking forward.
It's much more likely that society will simply regress to a pre-industrial state as knowledge becomes more scarce, infrastructure breaks down and environmental protections are rolled -leading to things such as burning rivers as well as the spread of plagues.
Everything will have to become local and community-based, so I applaud your efforts on that -that's one of the few things I see that can make any sort of difference in the long term.
I've stopped trying to predict the likelihood of future events and instead have been studying history so that I have a larger knowledge base to draw on as new, unpredictable events arrive. There are some really smart people who have spent careers analyzing, pondering, and writing so that future generations might be more prepared.
Timothy Miller, Adam Tooze, and Sherry Turkle are my favorites right now. Just started Daron Acemoglu's new book this week, strong contender for list expansion.
I was skeptical about this too. I used to have the $100/month Claude subscription. I'm still on my first month of just using open weight models, but so far I think the costs will be comparable. Maybe even less some months. But obviously it depends on your actual usage. I think it's worth trying it out instead of just assuming it will cost much more.
I'm not a super heavy user, but I pulled my token usage last week and it would have cost me about $10 USD per day to use DS via GreenPT. And DeepSeek is just a less capable model than the frontier models.
"but my vibes-based opinion from using it is that it's basically on par with Claude Opus 5.5 for software engineering." is an outright lie that's qualified by a "well in my opinion.."
unless you're comparing the most extreme specific harnesses to claude code that's just false.
..and I have a lot of disdain toward Anthropic , & I think GLM is great (although too expensive outside the z plans), but it's just wrong by every scorable metric.
Yeah, I see these takes a lot. A bunch of people saying e.g. they use DeepSeek 4.1 flash for all their coding and notice no difference to frontier models
I tried it for a day running everything twice, once with opus 5.5 and once with deepseek. If you notice no difference... I don't know what to say.
I think maybe it's people working on tiny self contained things where code quality doesn't matter that much? But in a big codebase, the open models just aren't good enough to make good changes
> American frontier labs are run by unhinged lunatics who genuinely believe they're creating the Machine God, that they're fine with burning down the world to bring about AGI, and that they believe with religious fervor that they're the only ones smart enough to safely control it
I like hyperbole as much as the next guy. And I'm cynical by nature. But this just seems like a wildly pessimistic view that gives literally zero charity to anyone working at or leading a frontier lab. And the fact the author goes on to say that they "already knew this" just points to confirmation bias.
The rest of the article is actually pretty decent and encourages people to investigate and run open weight models. That is a totally reasonable position that I don't think requires the heavy-handed in-group signal that precedes it.
The "think they're building the Machine God" part and "think they're the only ones that can be trusted to build it" parts are true.
Controversially: I agree with them. They're correct to think that. They are, and they are.
At the very least, the former is true even if the latter is murky. I trust them over Facebook and Google and China and open source "raze the commons" labs.
I trust Anthropic more than OpenAI when it comes to ASI catastrophe prevention, but I still trust OAI more than those other parties. But both still might fuck it up.
Why do you trust them to build it? They've already demonstrated that they're unable to prevent breakouts when training today's level of model, why will they suddenly be more careful / "smarter" when training tomorrow's?
You say you trust them more than Google, but Google's actually kept their models under much better lock-and-key. But even if we do take for granted that they're more trustworthy, that still doesn't make them actually trustworthy.
Pure psychosis. Wtf even is a “machine god”? Read what you’re saying
Psychosis has a meaning, use a different term.
_That wasn't hyperbole_...
Why do those working at frontier labs deserve charity?
because they are human, and all humans deserve charity until their behavior suggests otherwise.
> until their behavior suggests otherwise.
Seems to me we crossed that line a while ago.
I don't follow. Every human working at a frontier lab has exhibited bad behavior? I disagree with that.
Maybe the theory is that working at the frontier lab ipso facto bad behavior.
Everyone who works at frontier labs is working on a product that is accelerating climate change, seeks to displace jobs at a massive scale to concentrate profit in the hands of a few elites, and at least some of them believe what they are doing has a "10% chance of killing all humans".
(note: it's important to correctly apportion blame to the amount of power you have. The janitor at openai doesn't really have enough say to be at fault)
There's very little diffusion of responsibility here; almost everyone at the labs is directly working on building incredibly dangerous systems that they themselves admit to being unable to control, and they almost all have the financial means to stop working if they so chose.
Well then I think we are well past the point where they deserve charity.
> that gives literally zero charity to anyone working at or leading a frontier lab
With all due respect, dude, who cares.
Oh noes! We are not giving the billionaire steering reality without a democratic mandate enough benefit of the doubt. I'm sure they will feel mildly sad now.
It is a valid and admirable goal to defend people that are being shat on online, but keep in mind that you are in fact not a billionaire + it is in fact in your own best interest that people without a democratic mandate do not get to control the world.
Please consider taking this style of discourse over to Reddit.
I have considered it and decided against it.
> ...that they're fine with burning down the world to bring about AGI...
I like the odds and am happy to play this lottery. Bring it on!
It's amazing how unconscious people are of how much they have to lose.
My hunch is that if you do not share the same opinions on Ai, you cannot get a job working at a frontier lab. Contemporary "cultural fit" reduces thought diversity and leads to echo chambers. I've seen a few HN comments about lab interviews that indicate this is a possibility.
None of this is a hyperbole. If you think it is, you're just part of the cult.
I’m not sure this is actually hyperbole. There have been credible links between Dario Amodei and the Effective Altruism movement, Effective Altruism off course being a cult-like movement with weird believes that rhyme a lot with the eugenics movement. Sam Altman, while not as bad as Dario Amodei, has also weathered many weird believes which likens AI to some god-like entity, including doomsday prediction which share a lot of themes with Christian doomsday cults.
Read End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World.
> who genuinely believe they're creating the Machine God,
I promise you none of them believe that. It takes 10 minutes with an LLM and the right set of questions to figure out that were are maybe like 10% of the way there towards AGI.
"10% of the way towards AGI over ~5-10 years" (depending on how you measure it) would be a terrifying statement even if the rate of progress weren't also exponentially increasing.
And like any complex software, the last 20% takes 80-90% of the time.
> ChatGPT and Claude will never be private
> These companies only offer closed versions of their powerful models (despite the word "open" in "OpenAI"). You pay them for chat and/or API access, and they are allowed to look at everything you do.
How should I reconcile this claim with 'Google Vertex' and 'Amazon Bedrock' being offered as providers with zero data retention on https://openrouter.ai/anthropic/claude-opus-5.5#providers?
Indeed - Azure also has a ZDR (even for security purposes) option. You have to fill out a form, and a (likely) human evaluates and decides if you get it.
My guess is the average Joe will get rejected, but if you're a big company who cares about trade secrets, etc - of course the major cloud providers will provide a ZDR option.
Openrouter gives you access to the ZDR endpoints when you sign up as an average Joe. I was surprised to learn recently that this is an option.
EDIT: strangely Azure shows up as ZDR on openai's models but not anthropic's: https://openrouter.ai/openai/gpt-6.1-sol#providers
Anthropic uses their market power to force Microsoft to abide by their 30 day retention, and likely the "don't be mean to Claude" rule they are rolling out.
For clarity, I do not think you should use abusive language with Ai because of the impact it has on you, Ai only simulates emotion through language use, there are no hormones at work.
So they don't consider Zero Data Retention as a human right. It's exclusive to selected elite corporations.
Really should be ZDR by default.
Since you seem to know, it's one thing to not retain any data long term, but is the data used for training when it goes through the system? Does ZDR at Azure mean that in practice?
My information is over a year old.
For all the major providers (except Deepseek), API use is simply never used for training (chat use often is).
My point (and the author's) was that even though they commit not to train, they do still retain data (security audits, etc).
With a ZDR agreement, they commit not to retain anything for any purpose.
by considering that this is not the main way most humans interact with Ai, the vast majority of people do not pay for Ai, ergo they are the product
The article singles out paying users. So there is a way to pay for OAI/Anthropic models without having the model trainers look at all you do, it's just not well known.
His gripe is not merely about training, but about them keeping the data around for N days for security audits - that's how last year Azure discovered how various accounts around the world were using LLMs to manipulate elections, etc.
Given that the article is recommending something called Tinfoil instead, I don't think that's particularly relevant here.
If you don't trust OpenAI and Anthropic to follow their own policies, how do you decide what companies to trust? Vibes?
From both experience and the continued state of the incentives that lead to the behavior, it seems unreasonable to trust any company at their word about such things
If there were an International AI Club which trained models, and all the members sat down each year and voted for the board I would trust it even if it had a cutthroat commercial arm.
I think the only thing that matters is control.
Secure enclaves
But you're still trusting the company to actually follow those practices, which is what I'm getting at. The author assumes that OpenAI and Anthropic won't follow their stated practices, then assumes Tinfoil will follow theirs.
I switched to GLM on 5.2 and I am happy to be off the two evil frontier providers.
But now I have two new issues:
1. I have fomo from not being face-in the bleeding edge of things.
2. I am ambivalent about z.ai. China -based company is problematic, but they should get my money since they do good for the world. Switching to Mistral for GLM makes my problem inverse since the money doesnt go exactly to to the right place but I trust a french company.
Lets hope the near future resolves our need for personal VRAM and ultimately full self hosting. Coding must be free again. This is the way.
If you think any company capable of even coming close to competing with frontier labs aren't "evil" in the same way these frontier labs are, then you're a sucker.
You either practice enough nuance to know that labeling a company like these "evil" is doing a disservice to the critical thinking needed in this discourse, or any company in this space (and likely just any company in general) is fundamentally evil. Picking and choosing based on your feelings is pointless.
>They are chinese, but they should get my money since they do good for the world.
Love the implication that them being Chinese is the moral dilemma lol. Also love that a company just operating in a competitive space is doing "good for the world" because... what, they offer this service cheaply? lol
> Picking and choosing based on your feelings is pointless.
Harm reduction is a good thing to apply here. It means picking the least-bad option whenever possible.
Best case: you don't need to use any LLMs.
Second best case: you have the hardware on hand to run a local model, and can work within those constraints.
Third best case: you use an open-weight model provided by an inference provider in your country that uses renewable energy.
And on down the line until you get to the worst possible actions: giving money to anthropic, openai, or grok.
> Love the implication that them being Chinese is the moral dilemma lol.
The moral dilemma is not with ethnicity but rather about the CCP.
> "good for the world" because... what, they offer this service cheaply? lol
cheaply is nice, but the main point is that GLM is open weights. A resounding YES: z.ai are doing the good for the world.
You don't have to give z.ai any money. GLM is an open-weight model.
OpenRouter lists a few dozen providers for GLM 5.3 and GLM 5.3 Flash. Pick a provider in your country and keep at least some of that money from going to china (not counting all the hardware).
If you don't trust OpenAI and Anthropic not to abide by their own Privacy Policy, you really should not trust OpenCode Go. The latter (last time I checked) is very opaque. Why don't they reveal who the backend providers are?
It's hard to do that when private equity says yes and shoves it down users.
At my own stuff I can do what I want, at work I have no agency and it's not looking like anything is changing soon.
I'm concerned our media / political ecosystem is too dysfunctional to not repeat the mistakes we made with Big Tech & Social again with Big Ai. I find it curious how split the dev community is, and especially HN, is on this, which has long been skeptical and speaking truth to power. I'm surprised at how quickly the public switched to abdicating to Big Ai's claims and recommendations. These people do not have our interests in mind.
Great piece, thanks for putting some of my thoughts in organically sourced words.
The level of astroturfing and hate on HN whenever a non-US AI story is posted is really quite shocking. HN has always had a US bent, but it's gotten to the point where you can't even have a technical discussion of non-US AI because it will be drowned out by a very vocal anti-everyone-else-but-the-US crowd.
But yes, great piece. It really captures why I use open models on european hardware. It's like we haven't learned by now that competition is good and we should be encouraging a diverse and open ecosystem.
> The level of astroturfing and hate on HN whenever a non-US AI story is posted is really quite shocking.
I've observed similar with my negative comments towards Big Ai. Anecdata and vibes caveats
And I've observed similar about my positive comments about big AI shrug.
That fawning for the oligarchy to be negatively received by HN, I find inline with what I (in bias) expect to be a standard HN response. One of my biggest curiosities is how much of the HN community has formed emotional attachment to their preferred Ai buddy or open v closed position. I suspect this is a significant contributor to the astroturfing we see around Ai.
lol, the idea that you’d call a generic positive comment about the big labs “fawning for the oligarchy” is an excellent example of what I was talking about, so thank you! chef’s kiss
I was not making comment about any specific comment, but rather a generalization of the astroturfing and comment patterns that can be described as fawning, which do exist here on HN.
Has the HN population really been skeptical? I think most see the scam (uber, WeWork, Airbnb, etc) for what they are (mostly illegal efforts to steamroll laws and blitz scale to a monopoly), and they want in.
> I think most see the scam (uber, WeWork, Airbnb, etc) for what they are (mostly illegal efforts to steamroll laws and blitz scale to a monopoly), and they want in.
Nah. Back when Uber was boasting about all the laws they were flouting, I was pretty anti-Uber, and I was among the minority here on HN. Most of the comments were about how problematic the taxi system is, and how it's great Uber was breaking the cartel.
I think young people in search of a fortune are quick to rationalize.
If memory serves me, HN turned on Uber pretty quickly around the time stories like the Christmas party started showing up, where they put up stats like trips to planned parenthood by day of week up on a big projector.
True, people often do realize the grift. But then turn around and hail the next company funded by the same VC funds and a revolutionary event in the history of humanity.
What mistakes did media / political ecosystem make with big tech and social?
Also I don't understand how 'the media' is separate from social media. People decided to shift their media consumption from magazines, cable tv, corp news outlets to social media. Aren't they all the media (in function)?
Everything's a grift to our current leaders and media. The specifics are wholly irrelevant and replaceable. crypto, AI, it's buzzwords and the important thing is how much money they can make off the grift du-jour.
Of course there are differences with the impact AI is having economically and the devastation wrought by datacenters -but that doesn't matter to the media or the politicians; they simply want their greenbacks, specifics and effects be damned.
I hear more people talking about this, the wealth inequality, the dysfunction, the blatant corruption. We like to look for easy quick fixes, but remedying the last 50 years will likely take just as long. I hope I'm wrong and working on this is the majority of my volunteer/community efforts this year and looking forward.
It's much more likely that society will simply regress to a pre-industrial state as knowledge becomes more scarce, infrastructure breaks down and environmental protections are rolled -leading to things such as burning rivers as well as the spread of plagues.
Everything will have to become local and community-based, so I applaud your efforts on that -that's one of the few things I see that can make any sort of difference in the long term.
I've stopped trying to predict the likelihood of future events and instead have been studying history so that I have a larger knowledge base to draw on as new, unpredictable events arrive. There are some really smart people who have spent careers analyzing, pondering, and writing so that future generations might be more prepared.
Timothy Miller, Adam Tooze, and Sherry Turkle are my favorites right now. Just started Daron Acemoglu's new book this week, strong contender for list expansion.
Well... except that both companies offer insane subscription benefits to individuals. So a hosted open weights model still comes out more expensive.
I'd move in a second if it weren't so. But it looks like it will be about 5X more expensive for me. So.
I was skeptical about this too. I used to have the $100/month Claude subscription. I'm still on my first month of just using open weight models, but so far I think the costs will be comparable. Maybe even less some months. But obviously it depends on your actual usage. I think it's worth trying it out instead of just assuming it will cost much more.
Right - but my usage is quite high and the $200/mo level gives you 4X as many tokens. That's the thing - they bribe you with crazy deals.
I looked into it a couple of months ago and it wasn't a win.
Using Deepseek v4.1 Flash on something like GreenGPT is probably about a euro a day if you use it all day. Hard to see how that is 5x more expensive.
I'm not a super heavy user, but I pulled my token usage last week and it would have cost me about $10 USD per day to use DS via GreenPT. And DeepSeek is just a less capable model than the frontier models.
Umm... I'm not sure... but if you're only paying a euro a day... it sounds like your only running one agent at a time?
Your token usage absolutely scales with parallel agents. So.
> except that both companies offer insane subscription benefits to individuals
For now.
Well... yes. Exactly.
"but my vibes-based opinion from using it is that it's basically on par with Claude Opus 5.5 for software engineering." is an outright lie that's qualified by a "well in my opinion.."
unless you're comparing the most extreme specific harnesses to claude code that's just false.
..and I have a lot of disdain toward Anthropic , & I think GLM is great (although too expensive outside the z plans), but it's just wrong by every scorable metric.
Yeah, I see these takes a lot. A bunch of people saying e.g. they use DeepSeek 4.1 flash for all their coding and notice no difference to frontier models
I tried it for a day running everything twice, once with opus 5.5 and once with deepseek. If you notice no difference... I don't know what to say.
I think maybe it's people working on tiny self contained things where code quality doesn't matter that much? But in a big codebase, the open models just aren't good enough to make good changes
>> I've been mostly using GLM-5.3 on low reasoning, with great results.
Bro come on.
So that leaves, what? Muse? Grok?
Muse is run by Zuckerberg, which is a red flag. Grok is run by a racist.
I guess I could go with the Chinese models - I'm not working on anything dangerous.
Not using AI is also an option.