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Comment by HDThoreaun | Hacker News Reader

The open models suck. AWS hosts them for less than closed models cost but no ones uses them, because they suck.

It's not the open models that suck, it's the infrastructure around them. None of current "open weights providers" have:

   - good tools for agentic workflows
   - no tools for context management
   - infrastructure for input token caching

These are solvable without having to pay anything to OpenAI/Anthropic/Google.

Why would the open weights providers need their own tools for agentic workflows when you can just plug their OpenAI-compatible API URL into existing tools?

Also, there are many providers of open source models with caching (Moonshot AI, Groq, DeepSeek, FireWorks AI, MiniMax): https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/best-practices/prompt-cach...

> when you can just plug their OpenAI-compatible API URL into existing tools?

Only the self-hosting diehards will bother with that. Those that want to compete with Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Codex et caterva will have to provide the whole package and do it a price point that is competitive even with low volumes - which is hard to do because the big LLM providers are all subsidizing their offerings.

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