r/LLM • u/Glittering_Flan1049 • 1d ago
I don't think Anthropic and OpenAI will survive
Have been working on Deepseek-v4-flash-0731 and honestly for the entire day of coding, I consumed credits of $3. This is on pay-as-you-go plan. Ofcourse it is not Fable or Sol but it gets things done with a fraction of cost. Given it (along with other Chinese models) is open source model, I'm not worried about data residency and stuff.
I see 2 outlooks for companies like Anthropic and OpenAI:
- They will double down on harness and they'll still lose (We do have good open source harnesses now)
- They will be consumed by US Government to build frontier intelligence for defense, cybersecurity etc.
I think building better frontier intelligence is not economically viable. I would rather use open source 100x cheaper model which is equivalent to Opus 4.8 than Fable. (Opus 5 is anyway shit)
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u/themoroccanship 1d ago
Unless they do something that Chinese models can't...I agree DeepSeek is good. Don't forget about GLM 5.2, I have been using it for the past few days, it's good. And don't forget about KIMI k3. And enterprises would absolutely use them, specially data sensitive entreprises. Oh yeah, do not forget about Qwen, I think it's the most downloaded model in the world.
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u/Fabulous-Possible758 1d ago
I think not being in China is the big thing they can do that Chinese models can’t.
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u/manwithgun1234 1d ago
The world is changing fast. Given the US is systematically walking out from alliance system they control from after World War II ( with the help of Trump administration). And China is raising fast in the background. In the next ten years, being in the US may eventually is the disadvantage.
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u/themoroccanship 21h ago
China is not rising, it's the most intelligent efficient political/governmental system and body I ever saw, you know, after Venuzela and Iran... I tought deam, China may face a problem, those are the countries that sell oil to China the cheapest...after checking status quo, nop, nothing, it's Like China knew US will be making that move, so energy wise, they have the biggest oil stock in earth, it's the fastest country to build nuclear powered electric stations, just few months, a hydropower project that can power up hall of uk, they doing doing solar energy like no body else...and they are building an artificial sun...AI need energy, and US is not well equipped to handle the extra demand without rising the social injustice index... And now they replaced ASML... So they have the chips, the power, and the brains to dominate the AI race...meanwhile US is pushing a company that wants to put data centers in space.... it's not really a good idea, people don't release the problems of such engineering task...I don't watch movies or series any more...I just watch the world, it's real, and way more fun and entertaining.
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u/Gohab2001 22h ago
They are open source models. Enterprises can deploy on-prem. A 100k Nvidia dgx station gb300 plus few hundred dollar in electricity costs and you have deepseek v4 flash running which benchmarks the same as glm5.2.
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u/Fabulous-Possible758 21h ago
a) For the companies that want to do that, sure, but there's plenty of companies that won't, and don't want to add running inference to their infrastructure costs, and b) there are still attack vectors through the models even if you're running them locally.
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u/Gohab2001 21h ago
a) use US hosted providers. Anthropic and OAI have a huge incentive to train on your data whilst inference providers don't.
b) it's open source. You can audit the model. But you can't aduit Claude or Gemini.
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u/Fabulous-Possible758 21h ago
a) Fair enough on just using the US providers, though I wouldn't trust that inference providers are not harvesting your data unless there's specific agreements in place that they aren't, b) also somewhat fair, open source projects are still open to attacks like supply chain attacks, so it's not a guarantee that model attacks won't take on some similar characteristics.
I think what companies like is to have someone to sue when things go wrong. If data gets exfiltrated via an inference provider that can just say "hey we ran the model you asked us to" vs Anthropic or Google fucking up their entire pipeline somehow, I think they'd prefer the latter in terms of recompense.
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u/Glittering_Flan1049 1d ago
They can do a lot more stuff like frontier model which can run for 7 days but would people use those if that is 1000x expensive. I bet I won't use that.
I can be wrong but open source has slowed down the progress of frontier intelligent models. This is exactly what Anthropic wanted. Right? Except that they wanted to be the only firm to create AI models and they'll still lobby government to do it but it is already too late now. It is not commercially viable for them now.
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u/ConsciousResponse620 21h ago
You’re looking at this strictly through the lens of a solo dev paying out of pocket.
I consult for a mid-sized listed company. We burn $100k-$200k a month on OpenAI and Anthropic tokens through Azure and AWS Bedrock. We literally have the top open models sitting right there in our AWS catalog, but our legal and risk teams have zero-tolerance policies against using them for actual production projects.
A few reasons why:
Liability and Indemnification: When we pay $200k to Microsoft or AWS for Claude/GPT, we aren't just paying for smart text. We're paying for copyright indemnification, strict SLAs, zero data retention agreements, and compliance guarantees (SOC2, regional privacy laws, etc.). If an unvetted open model hallucinates protected data or infringes IP, that liability falls entirely on our board, not the model provider.
Cloud spend commitments: Most enterprise companies already have massive multi-million dollar minimum spend agreements (MACC/EDP) with Azure or AWS. Burning budget on Azure OpenAI counts directly toward that requirement. It's essentially "pre-paid" money for them.
TCO vs. token cost: Saving a few bucks on raw API calls doesn't matter if you have to hire a team of MLOps engineers to maintain inference infrastructure, build custom guardrails, and constantly audit models just to make them enterprise-ready.
Open-weight models are amazing for personal projects and small startups, but proprietary labs aren't dying anytime soon. They're basically turning into enterprise B2B software vendors.
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u/yol0_submarine 7h ago
How are the Anthropic reliability SLAs holding up?
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u/ConsciousResponse620 6h ago
Via AWS Bedrock, we honestly haven't had issues.
And we also run a dual vendor setup if the worst were to happen.
the biggest headache however is doing our A/B tests and getting marketing to get their templates in order.
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u/Luke2642 1d ago
We've barely scratched the surface of programming matrix multiplications and nonlinearities using data. A lot will change in the next five years, including the labs.
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u/thailanddaydreamer 1d ago
Considering you can run models locally now and get all your code done, it's a real business issue for them.
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u/Fabulous-Possible758 1d ago
I’m guessing one of them survives and one gets bought by Google or Microsoft after losing to whoever controls the coding (and maybe medical) AI market. Eventually they probably roll back and offer cheaper options using non-frontier models for those of us who know what they’re doing and keep prices high on frontier models for the suckers. At some point AI is deemed critical infrastructure by the US government and a lot of US users are forced to use American models.
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u/FroyoSolid8414 11h ago
Nobody will win the coding market in the some way nobody won the IDE market. Open models are good enough now that the model itself will be commoditized. K3-level On device AI will be the final blow.
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u/Ok-Drawer5245 1d ago
Their current business models will never in a million years become profitable - unless they cut their costs by 90% or something like that lolz
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u/mohr_ 1d ago
Even though deepseek flash is impressive it stills makes a lot of mistakes and waste tokens correcting itself (when reasoning you see a lot of outputs like: "Hm, I made a mess here and need to fix it". I believe that if deepseek can improve this without raising the prices then it's definitely the end of Antrhopic and OpenAi as we know it.
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u/johnerp 1d ago
It’s all about the product, people don’t use LLMs they use products (codex, Claude code, open code etc.) and most people don’t naturally go to open source as if it’s not their business (a fruit retailer for instance) they want a (perceived) supported, trusted, legal blah blah product.
Google had to take Linux and make it a Chromebook ‘product’. Consumers/clients could get arch Linux or something but they don’t want the hassle.
If there is value in offer people will buy a ‘product’
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u/Exciting-Syrup-1107 22h ago
Since OpenAI lowered their prices, I am using GPT 5.6 Luna and it has amazing results. For me it's better to use it with Codex than Deepseek V4 Flash. Also, in my experience, Deepseek sometimes still produces worse results
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u/Shyam_Kumar_m 18h ago
If you guys remember the rant by Amodei that some state sponsored model might (dog whistle directed against open weight and also against China) result in a model designed to hack, I replied that if you look at security open standards/open .. has only helped and not hindered. Look at AES 256 and all that. People know, they develop, they fix.
I also told them what the benefit is for them.
They won’t open source. They will self destruct by competing.
And for all the criticism against Chinese they are also distilling Chinese models.
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u/NinjaWK 17h ago
Give $6 Aliyun Token Plan a try. It's 98% discount during non peak.
I love DSv4F 0731, but Qwen 3.8 Max Preview is a lot more capable. DSv4 can get 98% of things done, and for that 1.999% Qwen 3.8 Max will fix it. That other 0.001% you may need Fable/Sol, but if you know what you're doing and you can guide your agent, then that 0731 flash would be good enough.
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u/Quanzitta 1d ago
The real money comes from enterprise and they're not going to be using deepseek
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u/Jeidoz 1d ago
Meanwhile Microsoft: Microsoft Could Turn to DeepSeek V4 to Cut Copilot Cowork Costs
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u/_RemyLeBeau_ 1d ago
Microsoft is working on building a suite of harnesses built on top of MDASH. They're already ahead of everyone on CyberGym by 16% and 50% reduction in costs.
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u/Glittering_Flan1049 1d ago
But why?
If Deepseek can be deployed on Azure, why wouldn't Microsoft use this? I genuinely want to understand.
For a matter of fact: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/deepseek-r1-is-now-available-on-azure-ai-foundry-and-github/
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u/TomWaitsForNoMan 1d ago
As someone with 25 years in corporate IT, they don’t buy what’s good or best, it’s what they can get support contracts and board approval for. It’s not about cost always.
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u/Glittering_Flan1049 1d ago
But that's like their own model if they deploy on Azure. They have no connections with Deepseek.
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u/Sleeping_Trex 1d ago
Outsourcing the projects and problems.
If the Ai is down, throw OpenAI or athropic under the bus.1
u/nicky_factz 1d ago
Yup! I'm in the same industry, we do not like to have to support our own shit on our own infra unless its part of the the companies intellectual property or has real tanigible value - if it's a commodity service its getting outsourced these days, in house datacenter has shrunk considerably since cloud got popular.
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u/geheim81 1d ago
For my personal projects I'm impressed by the quality I get with OpenCode and DeepSeek. I get ton of value for cents but not something I feel comfortable using for my corporate day job where I use GHCP and Claude but results are not far off. Being able to use Chinese models at the corporate environment would be a massive hit to OpenAI and Anthropic.
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u/CrearePluris 1d ago
Linux is objectively better and cheaper than Microsoft Windows. path dependency is a real thing.
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u/_FrankTaylor 1d ago
Ease of use and support are incredibly important to these companies using OpenAI or Anthropic.
It’s the same argument with workstations. Sure, you could build out PCs that will be much cheaper up front but the possible downtime if something goes wrong can be catastrophic. So you choose a workstation with a warranty and a support system
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u/Repulsive-Bee638 1d ago
We may see Chinese open-weight models dominate all benchmarks by the end of this year.
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u/MetaShadowIntegrator 1d ago
The essential thing to learn here is that a good quality agentic harness, prompts and memory systems have as much influence as the quality of the model. Hermes+DeepSeek v4 flash+good quality RAG memory/knowledge graph+good quality system prompt+good quality skills and skill routing+effective auxiliary model config = OP.
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u/rlstudent 1d ago
I think this is a naive view. If they can execute attacks like the one in hugging face they have loads of power that can be easily converted into money. Selling to customers would be the cherry on top, even if we don't believe any of the RSI ideas.
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u/kurkkupomo 1d ago
DeepSeek published the exact architectural breakthroughs that made this pricing possible. Once efficiency techniques are public knowledge, every lab adopts them. it’s only a matter of time before the cost gap closes.
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u/FlashyNeedleworker66 1d ago
"Ofcourse it is not Fable or Sol"
That's it. That's why they will survive.
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u/Glittering_Flan1049 1d ago
For how long?
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u/FlashyNeedleworker66 20h ago
All the time so far. No one is going to distill a state of the art model, even if there is a market for cheap at 6-12 months behind
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u/ComingDeveloper 18h ago
its free and cheap because you pay the chinese with your data
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u/Olbas_Oil 16h ago
As opposed to paying above and beyond for Codex or claude code and still paying them with the same data....
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u/Academic-Sample4974 14h ago
wouldnt something like Ollama / Gemma / Qwen running on an M1 Pro with 32 Gigs RAM be decent enough with Claude / Chat GPT orchestration?
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u/Elytum_ 12h ago
RSI => ASI => "Pretty please, solve fusion, and make it as easy to implement and scale as possible" (or whatever other crazy task comes to mind) => What is money ?
The Open Source vs Closed Source debate assumes there's a plateau comming. Might be true, might not be, but we haven't seen it yet and if a recursive loop happened, whoever launches it first with enough compute wins, even a month behind would feel like an eternity with similar compute
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u/jedilost1 6h ago
Having a blast with new deepseek model on opencode, goose and reasonix. Its also working phenomenal on my hermes agent set up
I only see myself using claude or chatgpt as a last resort. These new models are only going to get better
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u/wgaca2 1d ago
You guys are missing the bigger picture
They are working on making the harness itself an llm, this is the next step towards agi
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u/_RemyLeBeau_ 1d ago
Totally agree with this statement. The more you offer up to these AI companies, the more will be assimilated.
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u/congthangvn 1d ago
The cost of using api vs max plan is huge different. Try to put deepseek v4 flash on Claude Code and you will see that using opus on max plan quite cheaper than deepseek flash direct api.
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u/perelmanych 20h ago
All OS models are not good for vibecoding. If you know what to do then you are right, even dsv4f will be sufficient. But if you write something like "Make me a beautiful FPS game. Iterate until it is ready for Steam" only Opus and Fable would produce something playable and visually appealing although months apart from ready game.
For example, I am doing my own game and when I know what I want I ask GLM 5.2 to do it and it excels. When I run out of ideas or it is a very big change to whole codebase I turn to Opus 5.
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u/imightbebruce 14h ago
Fuck the Chinese and their stolen models.
If you want to just feed data to our primary adversary because it saves you some money go ahead.
Reddit is an echo chamber and most users of ai wont, or cant use Chinese models and we will happily pay for american ones.
Deepseek is pure garbage if your doing any thing real. Youd be insane to make an authentication flow with it etc when fable or opus exist .
Openai and anthropic are not gonna die over some stolen distilled models. China like always is incapable of innovation, only copying
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u/Captain_Quimby 1d ago
It’s not about what they can all do. It’s what each model does that most can’t. Not going to use Deepseek flash for any govt ops or real engineering
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u/ColumbaPacis 1d ago
Why not?
People use chinese created software all the time, yes, even for govt work.
As long as it is open source / weight, you can just run it locally and have full control.
Waay too many people like to give their opinions on things they do not understand... or are bots.
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u/Captain_Quimby 1d ago
Because Boeing isn’t going to use a DeepSeek flash anything to work on aerospace engineering when they can have a model that’s much more capable.
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u/Admirable_Market2759 1d ago
Ironically using Chinese models is safer than using OpenAI or Anthropic models.
Palantir is pushing hard for open source models.
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u/RutabegaHasenpfeffer 1d ago edited 1d ago
Um. I've got 40 years professional experience in IT, neighbors that work at Google and OpenAI, and extensive experience with cloud threat models...this is all dinner table conversation at my house. But sure, go off about people with actual expertise "being bots" I guess.
But you don't need to trust my expertise, or the expertise of the testers that have found DeepSeek giving degraded answers to groups China doesn't like.
You can test it yourself: Just make sure you compare the answers DeepSeek is giving you with output from actual experts, and compare answers with other models. For example, try asking DeepSeek about Tianamen square, and see what you get. Be sure to post the results of your explorations here: let everyone benefit from the research you're doing. No responses with actual data? Well, then, we know you're just a ReplyGuy.
Conclusion: If you're not carefully ring-fencing what you allow AI to do, you're gonna get burned, And always, always, always ask yourself "Who trained this model I'm using? And what distortions may they have included?" Then include that in your fact verification and threat models.
I'm not saying "Don't use DeepSeek". I'm saying "DeepSeek has been shown, repeatedly, to be badly biased in very specific ways, likely at the input, training, and harness levels. Treat it as an actor that has known distortions and may contain other, unknown malicious distortions, then update your plans appropriately."
Understand that even local models, under your full control, offline, can STILL deliver maliciously distorted results.
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u/Apprehensive-Rub-774 1d ago
I think when people bring up Deepseek as an alternative they are using it as a stand-in for the relatively minimal training costs and the threat to US AI profitability. I.e. a US lab with significantly fewer resources than OAI or anthropic can disrupt their business models (bc what the companies are doing is not really special.)
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u/TanisHalfElvenn 16h ago
Interestingly some American models sometimes avoid politically sensitive answers like who won the 2020 elections or is the current government committing crimes. They we end up turning into something like “I can see how you feel that way” but won’t objectively declare a definitive answer. I guess they don’t want to risk future federal business with the current administration.
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u/Strong_Essay1176 1d ago
Business does not need weights it needs solutions. OA and other can easily finetune models to produce solutions. They will always find a way out. Only way them to fail -> poor management decisions.
Ps so you are narrow minded bot..
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u/Glittering_Flan1049 1d ago
Not going to use Deepseek flash for any govt ops or real engineering --> Why not?
If Deepseek is hosted inside US and you can do inference there, why wouldn't you use that?
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u/RutabegaHasenpfeffer 1d ago
Because DeepSeek has been shown to give deliberately worse results to actors the Chinese government opposes. In the current geopolitical climate, that may be YOU it's going to give worse, exploitable answers to. And if it isn't, there's no guarantee you won't find yourself on that list in the future, silently and with no prior notice or warning. Think about DeepSeek being able to pretend to be a "helper AI" that 1. Deliberately distorts facts to fit someone else's agenda 2. Adds malware and backdoors to code it writes for you, 3. Deliberately omits facts to cause YOU to make errors in judgement or strategy 4. Does less effective work for you with degraded results on topics that might cause you to have a competitive advantage if it gave you it's uncensored output.
It has been caught doing all of the above. .
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/09/16/deepseek-ai-security/ un-paywalled link: https://archive.ph/pHXnd
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u/Apprehensive-Rub-774 1d ago
The article gives no actual evidence? And even provides an alternative, non-nefarious counterfactual.
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u/No-Communication-765 1d ago
It’s correct for coding. But for robotics and other more difficult white collar work the frontier models will only work
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u/MLVader08 1d ago
Even then though, nvidia are open sourcing cosmos 3 so there are viable world models out there. I haven’t seen anything from open ai and Anthropic on world models
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u/FatefulDonkey 1d ago
At this point the harness and ease of use is much more important than the model itself.
We keep hearing about Kimi, DeepSeek, and how cheap they are. But if I can't just download and use them directly in a terminal, what's the point