The CCP requires extensive certification for new major releases, to make sure a model doesn't do anything they don't want it to.
To get around this, Chinese labs only bump versions when they have to and usually claim it's a minor update.
Then on the other side, they're obviously trying to market to the tech crowd...
Also, DS is an excellent model.
It's a bit like obsessing over patch releases of some software after a major upgrade already solved the original problem long ago.
And then when I try a smart model, like Astra medium and it solves it (I had a firmware bug in my new laptop where I couldn't charge through USB-C) on the first try (altough with a repo already having lots of information about the hardware/firmware/debugging programs/traces), I realize how much time I'm losing on the few examples that the less intelligent models are just not able to debug and solve.
Depends on your use case. But if you do software development with a harness such as oh-my-pi, your cache rates are probably somewhere above 98%. Coralbricks has free cache reads, meaning it's much cheaper than the Deepseek API rates.
Lithosai is more expensive especially in the ultra tier. It's if you want extremely snappy and fast responses, which is important e.g. for a personal assistant where every second counts.
If you generate a lot of output, you're better off with the Deepseek API rates.
What about "good governance"?
Does it have zero hallucinations? Does it reflect thoroughly on every single idea it uses, verifying its solidity?
I don't think there is a reason to care about any of it, just get a few dollars on a few openrouter or similar platforms and just use the models for now, wait for cheaper models that are good enough for you to become available for your hardware.
Sure you might never see frontier performance on consumer hardware but do you really need that though? Does anyone? And if you ever do just get a 30-day sub for that work, and cancel it.
Probably a pretty decent model for 90% of the usecases!
I've been doing a lot of hobby work with GLM 5.3 Flash and I can count the amount of times that I need a stronger model on two hands.
I have access to unlimited tokens at works and Opus is great but also often overkill if you know exactly what you need.
A very complex task tends to cost like 10$ max. It's comparable to a subscription with enormous flexibility.
It's a steal.
MiMo 2.6 Flash is the most capable model you can currently run on 2x Sparks without resorting to a quantised version of something.
BTW who would have thought China would be the champion of freedom and opensource in the AI arena, while US is fighting for corporate/government control.
There are different types of freedom and China's bet is that as long as they provide enough economic freedom the public will be ok with somewhat restricted social and political one.
The fact that she can't call Xi "Winnie the Pooh" on Douyin wasn't something that occurred to her, or maybe that she was aware of at all. I didn't ask. I don't like to get into these discussions when I'm in China.
Anthropic and DeepSeek (+ GLM) are definitely solving coding, though!
They're all quite different tools.
For me it's large files in Blender (in some cases >400MB), mostly, where Astra excels. I gave it a look, but I don't know if the benchmark encompasses that sort of thing.
.step files are simpler pieces of straightforward code, so it makes sense that Opus and Sonnet 5.5 do very well...
Besides, Fable 5.5 is reportedly releasing within the next few days, probably on Tuesday...
Here's How Distill APT Used McKinsey's Private Access To Top Anthropic Model To Help The Chinese Keep Up With The Us Top IA Labs Despite Access Restrictions
yes maybe opus 5.5 is stronger and flash is cheaper, but 6.1 strikes a good balance imo.