That is the funny thing to me. I hate diving into politics here on HN, but this has such a rank smell to it. Trump's comments about Dario. His insane propaganda video about how we will never be communist / Marxist. In the same breath our government is bribing people with offers of $$ (the $5,000 checks) and essentially bullying to outright moving towards saying this technology is so powerful we will just have to seize it for our own use.
It is impossible to miss the absolute hypocrisy of this moment and how people and corporations are supposedly free, but if you happen to be of interest to the government they will try to casually ruin you. It has always been this way, people just haven't noticed because it flies under the radar most of the time when the govern crushes some smaller enterprise or another because it got in their way or didn't play by their rules.
It seems simple to me. Anthropic is a private company. If you don't like it fix the laws or don't buy from them.
You're overlooking the critical difference between the government-as-government and the government-as-purchaser. You have to play on Walmart's terms--which are draconian and exacting--to sell to Walmart. Why should the DOD be any different when it comes to stuff the DOD is buying or indirectly paying its contractors to buy?
Yeah, the DOD is such a huge purchaser that it can "ruin you" by blacklisting you if you don't play by its terms. The same is true about Walmart if you're a grocery supplier, Apple if you make electronics components, etc. Private companies absolutely exercise their power like that.
I'm intensely skeptical that Walmart has clauses in its contracts saying that no supplier may use FooCorp software in the process of delivering its goods. If they do I would definitely call that an abuse of corporate power.
Ellison has more or less lived his entire life running Oracle (and his personal finances) completely over-leveraged, skating just barely ahead of disaster. I don't see this ending any way other than SV picking apart its bones for pennies on the dollar.
I load OpenRouter up and use models like GLM Flash 5.3, DeepSeek Flash 4.1, Luna, etc. And I often have random niche needs where I need a handful of calls for say, a really good image reader like Gemini Flash 3.8 or whatever. You can do a lot with $25 on openrouter or direct to chinese providers. I am cautious about what data I send overseas, but also like... just because it is in China does not inherently mean it is any less secure than a US provider.
I can't remember the last time any real recourse has mattered for companies getting breached or mishandling my data. Their stock just goes up and the govt just shrugs.
There also exists a $600-800 GPU that can run Qwen 27B 3.8 @ like 60 t/s for around 200W of energy.
I find Qwen Flash Next quite competent as well. 27B is a solid worker like you said. If you batch work and let them crank they do remarkably well. I am working on.
I started using Herdr and taught my agents to use it. So I use OMP loop and or goal, and it has a review cycles to wake up an Opus or Sol reviewer to make sure nothing is going off the rails with a local qwen flash next coordinating for me. I kinda prefer Sol, it seems like a more patient and thorough model, especially Sol 6, but Opus 5.5 is really good and its voice and attitude is not as grating as Opus 5 for sure.
I have a few V100 GPU running Qwen 27B and they do all the work overnight. Not quite the same speeds you have yet, but this is V100 machine and an old gaming machine with 16GB 4080 and a handful of 32GB V100s... all in less than 3K (ignoring that my gaming machine is 3 years old, but runs qwen flash next for free now as I game not a lot) for my little "we have AI at home" projects and there is a lot of interest in these old GPU now because they are rolling out of data centers now.
For my local work and personal projects... they just seem to be getting done in this setup. Every few days I sit down and do a big cycle with astra/fable/opus batch things up. I have projects that are basically "i want to see what happens" to "I want this to be good, I understand the code". Some of the throwaway projects that have just kind of magically finished more or less how I wanted have been great.
Physician lifetime earnings counting for delay, and debt… normal investment, etc: 8.5-10m. Software engineer median is much lower. About 6.5m. Specialist and high end varies greatly. Median doctor is earning 2x a SWE (130k vs 250k).
People on HN vastly overestimate SWE pay as an industry, biased by FAANG as we are :).
Lifetime earnings of 6.5M is more than lifetime earnings of 8.5M if the 6.5M is front-end loaded and the 8.5M is back-end loaded and starts with a 0.5M hole.
It's the difference between compound interest working for you vs compound interest working against you.
I accounted for that when I modeled it. I explicitly added investment start and compounding. A thing to remember: a physician is delayed yes but their higher income lets them much more heavily invest as their income often exceeds life expenses by a lot more than median swe.
I guarantee they are at least tweaking quants, caching systems, and finding ways to move serving costs down. This definitely impacts the model’s intelligence at times. There are also a lot of model tweaks, RLHF rollouts etc. I don’t think it means they are doing anything malicious or deceptive. And if Opus 5.5 is literally smarter than Fable? Ehh, it is plausible :)
They obviously test various quants and other serving cost saving strategies. Models like Fable are probably trillions parameters with hundreds of billions active MoE. They probably try to squeeze and quant each piece until people notice.
I have a 3 year old gaming system. RTX 4080 w/128GB of DDR5. It runs Qwen 38 Flash around 44-40 t/s with 128K context. It is on a specialized build that caches MoE experts and uses an optimized 3bit quant that basically is within a few points of the full 8 bit quant. In general, in casual benchmarking with Alibaba's endpoint I could not tell much of a difference. Overall this model is very good on long horizon agentic work. The main pain point for it is that its input processing speed is slow. Regardless, it gets meaningful work done.
Right? To get comparable brand and quality DDR5, which isn’t particularly great at AI anything it is ~$2000. All you had to do was start hoarding 3090 GPU and RAM in 2023. It is unhinged.
Simpler view for me: this is one of the most capital intense technologies to exist. Europe does not have enough capital to compete. China is building its own chips. It’s own everything. Silicon up. How do you compete with that. Only Google and maybe Aamazon is doing it domestically.
I feel people are too focused on US/China and don't pay attention to what is going on in the world.
ASML in the Netherlands for example was the only company in the world that makes EUV lithography machines, which all the major chip companies depend on. China recently reverse engineered their work to create machines since late 2025, but not sold commercially.
Ireland has chip production facilities.
EU might not be in the top 2, but it is not out of the running at all.
It is impossible to miss the absolute hypocrisy of this moment and how people and corporations are supposedly free, but if you happen to be of interest to the government they will try to casually ruin you. It has always been this way, people just haven't noticed because it flies under the radar most of the time when the govern crushes some smaller enterprise or another because it got in their way or didn't play by their rules.
It seems simple to me. Anthropic is a private company. If you don't like it fix the laws or don't buy from them.
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