Thread

1. lwansbrough · 1790024127 · focus · HN ↗

   Anyone else more excited about Chinese models than American models these days? Big thing for me is affordability.

   1. joshheitzman · 1790028798 · focus · HN ↗

      Absolutely! DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 has become my daily driver. It's pretty amazing what it can do for what it costs at deepinfra.com (I don't use deepseek as a provider since they train on your data [at least their honest about it]). GLM-5.1 was my daily driver before that and Kimi K2.5 before that.

      1. kingforaday · 1790029448 · focus · HN ↗

         Are you finding DS better then kimi k3 and glm-5.3? Do you mind sharing your primary use case?

         1. pimeys · 1790031859 · focus · HN ↗

            I've used Kimi K3 for a few months as my main model and DeepSeek 4.1 is as fast and about 10x cheaper.

            I just had like four big sessions going today, paid about $8 in tokens. I see no reason to pay more, this is more than I need for intelligence.

            1. pkulak · 1790036680 · focus · HN ↗

               4.1 consistently surprises me in capability for the price. And I don't think I'm the only one. It's been dominating the leaderboard at OpenRouter, and I just got an email today from Fireworks saying they were _raising_ the price by about 30%. I'll probably switch, because their infra doesn't support being the highest-cost, but it's still telling.

               1. celrod · 1790050760 · focus · HN ↗

                  I tried it a few times and liked the speed, but often found it ended up looping, i.e. repeating the same token sequence (e.g. the same sequence of 5 paragraphs) over and over again until it hit the max output limit. This doesn't end up happening every session, but does every now and then.

                  My impression of DSv4.1-flash was very positive aside from this. But that was enough for me to stick with GLM-5.3(-flash), which both gave me consistently great results

                  I was using a vibe coded bare bones harness. I was wondering if this was normal from DSv4.1-flash, or if its my harnesses fault.

                  1. pkulak · 1790053809 · focus · HN ↗

                     I've had that looping issue with open models too. But never 4.1. I wonder if it's a model + harness combo? But yeah, one loop issue and I'm done with a model forever.

                     1. pimeys · 1790057133 · focus · HN ↗

                        Harness. Especially if a tool call error doesn't say what to do next and the model is not RL'd with that tool, a retry storm is common.

                        So if you use MCP a lot, simplify the params, be more lenient on validation and rework the errors.

                        It is quite good with shell.

                        1. celrod · 1790108942 · focus · HN ↗

                           Yeah, that's what I'd been leaning towards. No mcp, but I'll see if I can reproduce and debug it, since other people don't seem to have that problem as badly as I've experienced it (and the idea of having a nasty bug like that bothers me).

                           No mcp support. I'll try copying deepseek harness's basic tool call formats as a starting point.

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