I think it is in the interest of chip makers to make sure we all get local models

When Sonnet 4.6 was released, I switchmed my default from Opus to Sonnet because it was about en par with Opus 4.5. While 4.6 and 4.7 are "better", the leap is too small for most tasks for me to need it, and so reducing cost is now a valid reason to stay at that level.

If even cheaper models start reaching that level (GLM 5.1 is also close enough that I'm using it at lot), that's a big deal, and a totally valid reason to compare against Opus 4.5

If money is no object, then nothing else is worth considering if it isn't Codex 5.4/Opus 4.7/SOTA. But for many to most people, value Vs. relative quality are huge levers.

Even many people on a Claude subscription aren't choosing or able to choose Opus 4.7 because of those cost/usage pressures. Often using Sonnet or an older opus, because of the value Vs. quality curve.

Opus 4.6 performance has been so wildly inconsistent over the past couple of months, why waste the tokens?

You compare with what's most comparable.

In any case a benchmark provided by the provider is always biased, they will pick the frameworks where their model fares well. Omit the others.

Independent benchmarks are the go to.

Quite some time is a little over 2 months. I understand this is actually true right now, but it’s still a bit hard to accept.

I think its only been like 10 weeks. I meant that's forever in AI time, but not a long time in normie people time.

What size of Qwen is that, though? The largest sizes are admittedly difficult to run locally (though this is an issue of current capability wrt. inference engines, not just raw hardware).

Their Plus series have existed since Qwen chat was available , as far as I remember. I can at least remember trying out their Plus model early last year.

For serious work, the difference between spending $10/month and $100/month is not even worth considering for most professional developers. There are exceptions like students and people in very low income countries, but I’m always confused by developers with in careers where six figure salaries are normal who are going cheap on tools.

I find even the SOTA models to be far away from trustworthy for anything beyond throwaway tasks. Supervising a less-than-SOTA model to save $10 to $100 per month is not attractive to me in the least.

I have been experimenting with self hosted models for smaller throwaway tasks a lot. It’s fun, but I’m not going to waste my time with it for the real work.

In fact it is appreciated that Qwen is comparing to a peer. I myself and several eng I know are trying GLM. It's legit. Definitely not the same as Codex or Opus, but cheaper and "good enough". I basically ask GLM to solve a program, walk away 10-15 minutes, and the problem is solved.

GLM 5.1 is pretty good, probably the best non-US agentic coding model currently available. But both GLM 5.0 and 5.1 have had issues with availability and performance that makes them frustrating to use. Recently GLM 5.1 was also outputting garbage thinking traces for me, but that appears to be fixed now.

GLM-5 is good, like really good. Especially if you take pricing into consideration. I paid 7$ for 3 months. And I get more usage than CC.

They have difficulty supplying their users with capacity, but in an email they pointed out that they are aware of it. During peak hours, I experience degraded performance. But I am on their lowest tier subscription, so I understand if my demand is not prioritized during those hours.

Yes. GLM 5.1 is that good. I don't think it is as good as Claude was in January or February of this year, but it is similar to how Claude runs now, perhaps better because I feel like it's performance is more consistent.

I'm using GLM 5.1 for the last two weeks as a cheaper alternative to Sonnet, and it's great - probably somewhere between Sonnet and Opus. It's pretty slow though.

I've been using it through OpenCode Go and it does seem decent in my limited experience. I haven't done anything which I could directly compare to Opus yet though.

I did give it one task which was more complex and I was quite impressed by. I had a local setup with Tiltdev, K3S and a pnpm monorepo which was failing to run the web application dev server; GLM correctly figured out that it was a container image build cache issue after inspecting the containers etc and corrected the Tiltfile and build setup.

Most HN commenters seem to be a step behind the latest developments, and sometimes miss them entirely (Kimi K2.5 is one example). Not surprising as most people don't want to put in the effort to sift through the bullshit on Twitter to figure out the latest opinions. Many people here will still prefer the output of Opus 4.5/4.6/4.7, nowadays this mostly comes down to the aesthetic choices Anthropic has made.

maybe they decided OpenAI has different market, hence comparing only with companies who are focusing in dev tooling: Claude, GLM

Yeah GLM’s great for coding, code review, and tool use. Not amazing at other domains.

I use it and think its intelligence compares favorably with OpenAI and Anthropic. The biggest downside is its speed.