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points by zozbot234 3 days ago | 0 comments

> whether or not Ant/OAI can stay ahead of the Chinese models.

Ant/OAI/Google are way ahead when it comes to the smartest, largest-scale and most compute-intensive models. By Jevons' paradox, if you make inference for leaner models cheaper (as the Chinese models do, being broadly comparable to GPT Terra or Claude Sonnet; barely approaching Opus/Sol at their very best) that only increases demand for the complementary service of very smart inference.

[–] randbyte 2 days ago

Hard disagree. I own my gb200 cluster and have unlimited supply of open weight tokens. Whatever is missing from the open weights, they can make it up from speed and multi agent swarm.

[–] girvo 2 days ago

Yeah: quantity is a quality all of its own. DS v4.1 Flash running at ~300tk/s makes its verbosity less of a downside, and the efficiencies the Chinese open model space has aimed for makes high concurrency easy for swarms/sub agent sets.

On the other side, I am still shocked at how good Qwen 3.8 Flash Next is on my GB10 Spark-like, even if it is only 45 tk/s decode!

[–] anonzzzies 3 days ago

Sure but routing simpler things to the open models and harder things to opus/astra gave us already a massive boost; rarely we run out of tokens on the subscription models and we recently cancelled a few seats on claude code / codex as we simply were underutilising. And also, we have users of our products ONLY using the cheap models as they benefit enough vs paying more. That was very different only months ago. I can see this gap just growing where the % of higher intelligent model use will get smaller and smaller.

[–] zozbot234 3 days ago

> Sure but routing simpler things to the open models and harder things to opus/astra gave us already a massive boost

You have to look at the effect in the aggregate, not just what any single actor is doing. This is the core of Jevons' paradox: it's based on surfacing additional demand for the same product (here, expensive model inference) that wasn't previously viable.

[–] ex-aws-dude 2 days ago

> By Jevons' paradox

Jevons Paradox is not a rule its just a sometimes observed phenomenon

It says nothing one way or the other whether that would happen or not