Hacker News Reader

I used to think that until I started using DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 for the past 2 days (what a bad name). It is terribly fast! And smart. And cheap.

^ This. HN crowd is way too willing to presume the superiority of Anthropic and OpenAI frontier models, or to dismiss the Chinese ones as some distillation parlour trick.

While that is unquestionably going on, these models are legitimately innovative and stand on their own legs.

So you say, but I've done plenty of blind taste tests. The Chinese models are 99% as good for my purposes, and, I think, 99% of applied business programming purposes.

Isn’t Kimi k3 more expensive than Opus 5.5 in the benchmarks?

Of course, benchmarks don’t tell you how much it will cost on your workload.

GLM 5.3 was more expensive than Haiku and Sonnet 5.5 on a workload I was testing recently despite being much cheaper on the price sheet.

Most user here using Deepseek flash or GLM flash which are cheaper.

To be frank, Kimi's a better model...

Depending on workload it could be like renting a bazooka to kill a few insects.