Thread

Qwen3.8 Max now ranked as the best overall model by agentic index

420 points · 270 comments · apitman

drnick1 · 1786043769 · focus · HN ↗
Why does an open weights model cost nearly the same as GPT5.6? $1.14 vs $1.23 on the cost index. Since you can't presumably run this on your own hardware given the model size and hence gain other things like privacy, I don't see any reason to move away from GPT at this rate.
1. eli · 1786043818 · focus · HN ↗
  It's not enough that it's better?
  Many providers will host it and will compete on price. It also can't easily be taken away because one company (or one government) decides they don't want it around any more. People can fine-tune it for particular workloads.
  1. drnick1 · 1786044982 · focus · HN ↗
    > It's not enough that it's better?
    It's barely better, and barely cheaper, not really enough to challenge the status quo IMO. Half the price for basically the same performance would be a much stronger value proposition.
    ux266478 · 1786046996 · focus · HN ↗
    What status quo? Just look at Openrouter's rankings: <a href="https://openrouter.ai/rankings" rel="nofollow">https://openrouter.ai/rankings
    Things change radically month to month. Nobody is remotely close to capturing the market or having any kind of stability over time. People move around quite a lot, often to sidegrade within a generation. Just playing fly on the wall with discourse would be enough to tell you all of this, even without the data to back it up.
    SwellJoe · 1786049960 · focus · HN ↗
    If anybody has, it's DeepSeek. But, with the promised price hikes, I'm sure that'll change. I'm guessing they're raising prices not because they're not making a profit at those prices, but because they're running into capacity problems and need to slow down until they've got more or risk providing poor service. For now DeepSeek Flash is the best deal going for API usage and its popularity makes sense.
    Also, OpenRouter misses most of the usage of the US models, as most people are getting those from the vendor directly via subscriptions.

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