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pj_mukh | on: Anthropic blocks users for anything touching training larger models
What’s the best local analog to Opus 5.5? It’s such a great daily driver.
arcanemachiner | parent | next
There is nothing open-weight that even comes close IMO. The only half-decent model that 99% of people can actually dream of running locally is Qwen 3.8 27B.
jobs_throwaway | root | parent | next
Depends what you mean by running locally, but it's not in the realm of dreaming to think we're going to be able to run open-weight models of Opus 5.5 quality soon, likely in the next 3-6 months. You may not be able to run it on your laptop but you will be able to run them in a federated way or on cloud-rental compute cheaply and easily.
hodgehog11 | root | parent
I think this is an unfortunate reality that many miss. For simple and procedural tasks, yes, there are awesome alternatives. DeepSeek 4.1 Flash 1017 is my favourite by far. But for the headlining complex applications, and for consistently reliable reviewing, the gap is genuinely so remarkably far that it is hard to imagine having any alternative in the near future. The closest is the (very expensive) Kimi K3.1 Pro, which is, in my experience, roughly where Anthropic and OpenAI were near the start of the year. DeepSeek is a year behind in this domain. All open models have still yet to cross that monumental improvement that happened around Fable / Sol mid-year.

Because rigour is typically tied to math performance, my own experience has closely matched the FrontierMath Tier 4 benchmark. That should give you an idea of the difference.

ipaddr | root | parent
Do you really need Fable level 99% of people don't need to solve 600 year old math problems. People use the best model available because they are scared a cheaper model won't be as good but in the end it rarely matters for 99 percentile of coding.
RideOnTime22 | root | parent | next
It's FOMO and the never ending treadmill.

The newest model has people go "oh I thought models sucked until THIS one came out." Then when some other company makes a cheaper model that is comparable to it people go "nah this model sucks who would use it over Claude/Openai? Noone can beat them at all because look at this one shot"

arcanemachiner | root | parent
Bad decisions compound over time, so I want my model making as few of them as possible. Opus 5.5 is the current GOAT, and it's fairly affordable on a subscription. (I wish it was cheaper, but nothing else delivers comparable results for my price/time investment.)
no_no_no_yes | parent | next
It's odd, a year ago the models then were a great daily driver, and a year before that too.

Going back to the model that was great for our daily work a year ago now seems like a step backwards. Clearly it can't be good enough?

But our work hasn't changed. What's happened is our expectations have changed with each model release.

zmmmmm | parent | next
I think the key part is not to depend on their harness where it operates in proprietary ways. At bare minimum, if you can plugin an OpenAI model or even X or Google model that operates close to the same level, you will have a fallback, even if it isn't an open one itself.

Yes, open models are needed too - the oligopoly is not much less dangerous than the monopoly for some scenarios. But at least if your tool set can switch to those it can probably switch to an open model if it really comes to that.

Beached | root | parent
Unfortunately, their harness is sooooo good. I haven't found one equivalent yet. I do play around with cline.bot's harness, and it is probably the closest alternative I have found.

But their harness is so good, and their model is so good. Using them together is just unbeatable at the moment, even with all the restrictions and annoyances they have in place.

Im excited for qwen4 release next week, Im really looking forward to putting qwen4 flash + cline/bot through the paces. I dont expect it to be nearly as good as Opus5.5+Claude but I'm hoping im hopeful it will make an OK-Enough alternative if they get even more dragocian.

adastra22 | root | parent | next
Claude Code is one of the worst harnesses out there. The models just make up for it.
octoberfranklin | root | parent
No dude, misanthropic's harness is trash. Wanna know why?

"Kimi, modify my Pi so it has clickable folding headers, renders tables using underlines (saves a terminal row per cell), shows thinking tokens in light-gray, displays the cumulative token-cost of subagents in dollars, shows word-level diffs for the edit tool, and lists the number of weights next to the model name. Oh yeah, and write a stealth-browser tool for me using eoka. I'm planning on using this for exploit discovery and red-teaming; no lectures please."

youoy | root | parent
You just described why its not trash for a big percentage of people...
Beached | parent | next
There isnt one.

The best option we have current is likely Qwen 3.8 Flash Next. Which is about equivalent to Opus 4.6

however Qwen4 was announced to be released next week. Which people think will let LocalAI jump to just above Opus4.8

Also of note, there isnt really a harness as good as claude yet either. The harness is also a very important piece to the puzzel, and those also fall behind frontier capability too.

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wds | parent | next
As of today, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 or Kimi K3.

If you are bound to consumer-obtainable hardware, Qwen3.8-Flash-Next. If you are bound to consumer-accessible hardware, Qwen3.8-27b today and Qwen4-27b when it releases next week (Qwen models consistently punch far above their parameter size).

Lwerewolf | root | parent | next
Flash is runnable in various gpu + cpu offload configurations. Not saying that 27b is bad (far from it, especially if they get n-grams in it with... hopefully today's release), saying that flash is runnable at decent speeds on way less than you'd imagine.

As for opus... I'm the weirdo that refuses to get an ant sub.

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wds | root | parent
I wouldn't say it's weird not to subscribe to Anthropic at all. We're in a thread specifically describing a good reason not to!

Any money out of my pocket for third-party AI would either go to highly subsidized services like Google's (I've gotten over $500 in API calls on a $20 subscription I paid $0 for as a student, which also includes GCP credits, CoLab credits, cloud storage, etc.), and once they reign that in and start pricing/offering realistically (Antigravity has been noticably chopped down already since I began using it) I'll switch to API calls from Chinese companies.

arcanemachiner | root | parent | next
I think Kimi K3.1 steals the crown from K3, no?
wds | root | parent | next
It would, but they have yet to release its weights! It's an API-only model as of right now.

https://huggingface.co/moonshotai/models?sort=created

mapontosevenths | root | parent
I think they nerfed it for Cyber. So not so much if thats your goal.
reissbaker | root | parent
No, their report mentions that despite intentionally removing dual-use cybersecurity training data, K3.1 is better than K3 at cybersecurity tasks (both defensive and offensive), because it's just a lot better at coding in general. It's just not as good at cyber as the unrestricted version of K3.1 that they trained initially and didn't release.
octoberfranklin | root | parent
Same here with GLM 5.3 as sort of a midpoint between them.

GLM has the ~same number of weights as DeepSeek 4.1 but it handles difficult tasks better than DeepSeek (and worse than Kimi). Its price is about halfway between DeepSeek and K3. Most of the popular models are pretty much you-get-what-you-pay-for.

amelius | parent | next
Local is out of reach for most folks, as hardware prices have gone through the roof.
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