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A 3B model just cleared a puzzle that a 1.6 TRILLION param model couldn't. You've seen this benchmark before: my sliding-puzzle test. Same Kimi & DeepSeek runs as last time. The only new thing: I dropped VibeThinker-3B in for a side-by-side. > VibeThinker → 3B > DeepSeek V4 Flash...

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stevibe

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32,494 views • 1 month ago •via X (Twitter)

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Six open-source LLMs. One sliding puzzle. A brutal test of long-horizon reasoning and tool calling. Five of them broke. One didn't. I gave each model a move_tile tool and a scrambled 3×3 board, then asked it to solve the puzzle through pure turn-by-turn reasoning. The deeper the scramble, the more brutal the search. Five runs per depth, best run kept. A model fails the round if it exceeds 6x the optimal move count. > Depth 5: Everyone solves it. Yawn. > Depth 10: GLM 5.1 melts down. 43 moves. Cut. > Depth 12: Gemma4 26B loses the plot, shuffling tiles in circles. Gone. > Depth 15: The wall. DeepSeek V4 Flash, out. DeepSeek V4 Pro, out. Gemma4, out again. GLM 5.1, out. Two survivors: Qwen3.6 35B-A3B, and Kimi K2.6 with an 11-move solve that looked like cheating. > Depth 18: Same two. Everyone else hallucinating tiles that weren't there. > Depth 22: Final boss. Kimi, flawless for five rounds, finally cracks. 81 moves. Still scrambled. DeepSeek V4 Pro limps home at 90. Qwen3.6 35B-A3B solves it in 36. The smallest model in the room. ~3B active params. Fits on a single 3090. It beat everything. Kimi was elegant. Qwen3.6 was unstoppable.
2:00

Six open-source LLMs. One sliding puzzle. A brutal test of long-horizon reasoning and tool calling. Five of them broke. One didn't. I gave each model a move_tile tool and a scrambled 3×3 board, then asked it to solve the puzzle through pure turn-by-turn reasoning. The deeper the scramble, the more brutal the search. Five runs per depth, best run kept. A model fails the round if it exceeds 6x the optimal move count. > Depth 5: Everyone solves it. Yawn. > Depth 10: GLM 5.1 melts down. 43 moves. Cut. > Depth 12: Gemma4 26B loses the plot, shuffling tiles in circles. Gone. > Depth 15: The wall. DeepSeek V4 Flash, out. DeepSeek V4 Pro, out. Gemma4, out again. GLM 5.1, out. Two survivors: Qwen3.6 35B-A3B, and Kimi K2.6 with an 11-move solve that looked like cheating. > Depth 18: Same two. Everyone else hallucinating tiles that weren't there. > Depth 22: Final boss. Kimi, flawless for five rounds, finally cracks. 81 moves. Still scrambled. DeepSeek V4 Pro limps home at 90. Qwen3.6 35B-A3B solves it in 36. The smallest model in the room. ~3B active params. Fits on a single 3090. It beat everything. Kimi was elegant. Qwen3.6 was unstoppable.

stevibe

16,434 views • 3 months ago

New LFM2.5-2.6B hits DeepSeek-V4 level on tool calling and runs 3.7x faster! We ran Liquid AI 's new LFM2.5-2.6B against DeepSeek-V4-Flash on one box with 4x RTX 5090. Both got the same three jobs, and each one only completes if the model fires every tool call Topics: -weather and local time in six cities -one budget into six currencies -four hotels checked and booked for one date Outputs: LFM2.5-2.6B: 35/35 tool-calls, 366 tok/s, 19s DeepSeek-V4-Flash: 35/35 tool-calls, 77 tok/s, 70s Both models made all 35 calls, and both fired twelve of them in one turn. LFM was trained for agents, and tool calling is where that shows. Strong result for a model you can run right on your phone
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New LFM2.5-2.6B hits DeepSeek-V4 level on tool calling and runs 3.7x faster! We ran Liquid AI 's new LFM2.5-2.6B against DeepSeek-V4-Flash on one box with 4x RTX 5090. Both got the same three jobs, and each one only completes if the model fires every tool call Topics: -weather and local time in six cities -one budget into six currencies -four hotels checked and booked for one date Outputs: LFM2.5-2.6B: 35/35 tool-calls, 366 tok/s, 19s DeepSeek-V4-Flash: 35/35 tool-calls, 77 tok/s, 70s Both models made all 35 calls, and both fired twelve of them in one turn. LFM was trained for agents, and tool calling is where that shows. Strong result for a model you can run right on your phone

atomic.chat

110,480 views • 12 days ago

DeepSeek V4 Flash & V4 Pro Official API Speed Test V4 Flash: 80.63 tok/s V4 Pro: 36.72 tok/s
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DeepSeek V4 Flash & V4 Pro Official API Speed Test V4 Flash: 80.63 tok/s V4 Pro: 36.72 tok/s

stevibe

17,555 views • 3 months ago

qwen 3.8 max vs deepseek v4 flash 0731 vs kimi k3 vs gpt 5.6 sol – on rubik's cube and chess four frontier models built a rubik's cube stand and solved it, then built a chess board and played claude opus 5 on it the setup: Nous Research's hermes agent cli on OpenRouter tasks: 1. cube – build a 3d rubik's cube with a cli and a Three.js viewer, then solve an identical scrambled position on your own stand 2. chess – build a 3d chess stand, then play white against claude opus 5 as black, live, one move at a time. no engine, no solver, no opening book on either side. stockfish depth 14 grades every chess ply afterwards; neither player sees the score models: DeepSeek v4 flash 0731, OpenAI gpt-5.6 sol, Kimi.ai kimi k3, Qwen qwen 3.8 max gpt-5.6 sol and deepseek v4 flash solved their cubes – sol in 24 moves and seventeen seconds, deepseek in 32. qwen and kimi never got there, giving up at 96 and 207 moves then all four built chess stands and played white against claude opus 5 on them, and all four resigned: deepseek on move 13, sol on 19, kimi on 21, qwen holding out longest at 29 - build time, both stands #1 gpt-5.6 sol – 16m 43s #2 deepseek v4 flash – 97m 39s #3 kimi k3 – 166m 09s #4 qwen 3.8 max – 215m 08s - build attempts before a working stand #1 gpt-5.6 sol – 3 #2 qwen 3.8 max – 4 #3 kimi k3 – 4 #4 deepseek v4 flash – 5 - total tokens #1 gpt-5.6 sol – 6,713,754 #2 qwen 3.8 max – 17,272,507 #3 kimi k3 – 22,427,504 #4 deepseek v4 flash – 27,417,442 - total price #1 deepseek v4 flash – $0.557 #2 gpt-5.6 sol – $6.319 #3 qwen 3.8 max – $10.270 #4 kimi k3 – $16.667 observations: • deepseek v4 flash is the cheapest model here by a margin nobody else is near, and it got there while being the least efficient of the four. it burned 27.4m tokens – more than anyone, 5m more than kimi – and still finished both benchmarks for $0.557. that is $0.02 per million tokens against kimi's $0.74. it also needed the most passes to produce working stands, five, and that did not matter: all five deepseek passes together cost a thirtieth of kimi's two • so what deepseek cannot do is get it right the first time. what it can do is get it right the fifth time, for half a dollar. that is a different thing to be buying – not a good first draft, but the option to keep asking • gpt-5.6 sol is the opposite profile and the strongest of the four on pure efficiency. 16m 43s to build both stands, 6.7m tokens, three passes – under 40% of the next lowest token count and a quarter of deepseek's, on an eighth of qwen's clock. it also solved the cube fastest of anyone, 24 moves in seventeen seconds. sol is what you reach for when you want the answer now and can absorb $0.94 per million • sol's weakness is in what it does not check. its chess viewer deleted the capturing piece instead of the captured one, so pieces disappeared off the board mid-game – a defect the fifty-cent deepseek stand did not have. fast and terse turns out to be the same dial as fast and unverified • qwen 3.8 max is not the cheap open-weights option it gets treated as. $10.270 across the two benchmarks, second most expensive of the four, 18x deepseek, and by a distance the slowest – 215 minutes of build time, nearly thirteen times sol's. what the money buys is judgment: it played eighteen moves without a single error worth a hundredth of a pawn, then made exactly one bad move in the whole game, and averaged 44.6 centipawns lost across the longest game any of the four managed. it also could not solve a rubik's cube in 96 tries • kimi k3 is the one line with no reading that flatters it. most expensive at $16.667, last on the cube at 207 moves, last at chess at 478 centipawns lost per move. it is also the model that verified hardest – on the cube it wrote its own integrity check instead of trusting its output. that makes the result worse rather than better: the checking was real, and the reasoning underneath it still was not follow thehype. for 24/7 ai news, analysis and breakdowns
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qwen 3.8 max vs deepseek v4 flash 0731 vs kimi k3 vs gpt 5.6 sol – on rubik's cube and chess four frontier models built a rubik's cube stand and solved it, then built a chess board and played claude opus 5 on it the setup: Nous Research's hermes agent cli on OpenRouter tasks: 1. cube – build a 3d rubik's cube with a cli and a Three.js viewer, then solve an identical scrambled position on your own stand 2. chess – build a 3d chess stand, then play white against claude opus 5 as black, live, one move at a time. no engine, no solver, no opening book on either side. stockfish depth 14 grades every chess ply afterwards; neither player sees the score models: DeepSeek v4 flash 0731, OpenAI gpt-5.6 sol, Kimi.ai kimi k3, Qwen qwen 3.8 max gpt-5.6 sol and deepseek v4 flash solved their cubes – sol in 24 moves and seventeen seconds, deepseek in 32. qwen and kimi never got there, giving up at 96 and 207 moves then all four built chess stands and played white against claude opus 5 on them, and all four resigned: deepseek on move 13, sol on 19, kimi on 21, qwen holding out longest at 29 - build time, both stands #1 gpt-5.6 sol – 16m 43s #2 deepseek v4 flash – 97m 39s #3 kimi k3 – 166m 09s #4 qwen 3.8 max – 215m 08s - build attempts before a working stand #1 gpt-5.6 sol – 3 #2 qwen 3.8 max – 4 #3 kimi k3 – 4 #4 deepseek v4 flash – 5 - total tokens #1 gpt-5.6 sol – 6,713,754 #2 qwen 3.8 max – 17,272,507 #3 kimi k3 – 22,427,504 #4 deepseek v4 flash – 27,417,442 - total price #1 deepseek v4 flash – $0.557 #2 gpt-5.6 sol – $6.319 #3 qwen 3.8 max – $10.270 #4 kimi k3 – $16.667 observations: • deepseek v4 flash is the cheapest model here by a margin nobody else is near, and it got there while being the least efficient of the four. it burned 27.4m tokens – more than anyone, 5m more than kimi – and still finished both benchmarks for $0.557. that is $0.02 per million tokens against kimi's $0.74. it also needed the most passes to produce working stands, five, and that did not matter: all five deepseek passes together cost a thirtieth of kimi's two • so what deepseek cannot do is get it right the first time. what it can do is get it right the fifth time, for half a dollar. that is a different thing to be buying – not a good first draft, but the option to keep asking • gpt-5.6 sol is the opposite profile and the strongest of the four on pure efficiency. 16m 43s to build both stands, 6.7m tokens, three passes – under 40% of the next lowest token count and a quarter of deepseek's, on an eighth of qwen's clock. it also solved the cube fastest of anyone, 24 moves in seventeen seconds. sol is what you reach for when you want the answer now and can absorb $0.94 per million • sol's weakness is in what it does not check. its chess viewer deleted the capturing piece instead of the captured one, so pieces disappeared off the board mid-game – a defect the fifty-cent deepseek stand did not have. fast and terse turns out to be the same dial as fast and unverified • qwen 3.8 max is not the cheap open-weights option it gets treated as. $10.270 across the two benchmarks, second most expensive of the four, 18x deepseek, and by a distance the slowest – 215 minutes of build time, nearly thirteen times sol's. what the money buys is judgment: it played eighteen moves without a single error worth a hundredth of a pawn, then made exactly one bad move in the whole game, and averaged 44.6 centipawns lost across the longest game any of the four managed. it also could not solve a rubik's cube in 96 tries • kimi k3 is the one line with no reading that flatters it. most expensive at $16.667, last on the cube at 207 moves, last at chess at 478 centipawns lost per move. it is also the model that verified hardest – on the cube it wrote its own integrity check instead of trusting its output. that makes the result worse rather than better: the checking was real, and the reasoning underneath it still was not follow thehype. for 24/7 ai news, analysis and breakdowns

thehype.

80,750 views • 13 days ago

DeepSeek V4 Flash vs V4 Pro, 4 canvas tests run. I'm a dev, and honestly DeepSeek was never on my list for coding tasks. After seeing these results, I might need to reconsider. 🌳 Tree: Flash actually beat Pro: denser canopy, better leaf distribution 🌌 Night sky: Pro wins, shooting stars, constellations, Milky Way band all there 🐟 Fish boids: Pro is stunning: proper caustics, tight schooling, real underwater feel 🏠 House builder: first model we've tested that knows how to actually build a rooftop DeepSeek coding might be underrated.
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DeepSeek V4 Flash vs V4 Pro, 4 canvas tests run. I'm a dev, and honestly DeepSeek was never on my list for coding tasks. After seeing these results, I might need to reconsider. 🌳 Tree: Flash actually beat Pro: denser canopy, better leaf distribution 🌌 Night sky: Pro wins, shooting stars, constellations, Milky Way band all there 🐟 Fish boids: Pro is stunning: proper caustics, tight schooling, real underwater feel 🏠 House builder: first model we've tested that knows how to actually build a rooftop DeepSeek coding might be underrated.

stevibe

56,270 views • 3 months ago

FREE DeepSeek V4 Pro and V4 Flash API. Runtime by Bad Theory Labs just dropped it. Same platform, new free model, same 2-minute setup. > Runtime already gave you free Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.5 access. Now they added DeepSeek V4 Pro and V4 Flash to the free tier. Absolutely FREE, YES. Same exact flow as before: → Go to runtime(.)badtheorylabs(.)com → Sign up with Google → Fill in your details during onboarding → Free balance lands automatically(But you don't need it to use DeepSeek - it's completely free right now) → Grab your API key from the dashboard → Plug into OpenCode, OpenClaw, or Hermes - done DeepSeek V4 Pro is one of the strongest coding and reasoning models available right now. Free tier also includes btl-2 - auto-routes between GLM, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemma. 10 million tokens per month at zero cost. 344 models total. One OpenAI-compatible endpoint. No code rebuild, no card, no limits hunting. >> Just start using the API, and when choosing a provider, select DeepSeek I tested it myself - fully working. Bookmark this before the free tier fills up.
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FREE DeepSeek V4 Pro and V4 Flash API. Runtime by Bad Theory Labs just dropped it. Same platform, new free model, same 2-minute setup. > Runtime already gave you free Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.5 access. Now they added DeepSeek V4 Pro and V4 Flash to the free tier. Absolutely FREE, YES. Same exact flow as before: → Go to runtime(.)badtheorylabs(.)com → Sign up with Google → Fill in your details during onboarding → Free balance lands automatically(But you don't need it to use DeepSeek - it's completely free right now) → Grab your API key from the dashboard → Plug into OpenCode, OpenClaw, or Hermes - done DeepSeek V4 Pro is one of the strongest coding and reasoning models available right now. Free tier also includes btl-2 - auto-routes between GLM, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemma. 10 million tokens per month at zero cost. 344 models total. One OpenAI-compatible endpoint. No code rebuild, no card, no limits hunting. >> Just start using the API, and when choosing a provider, select DeepSeek I tested it myself - fully working. Bookmark this before the free tier fills up.

Atenov int.

26,920 views • 1 month ago

I designed a new test specifically for multimodal models: fill out a paper form. And it's much harder than it sounds. This isn't typing into an electronic field that captures your text. The form is just an image. The model has to place each form element: text, checkmarks — at the correct pixel position on the canvas itself. Results: 🟢 Kimi K2.6 → done in 3:45, 16.7k output tokens 🟡 Step 3.7 Flash → half the fields, 57k output tokens 🔴 Gemini 3.5 Flash → 489k output tokens, never finished. I had to kill it. Gemini burned ~29x more output tokens than Kimi on the exact same task, and Kimi's was the only form that actually looked filled out. The test, a mocked application form, contains some challenging parts, such as one-character-per-box fields. I provided every model the same set of tools: > get canvas size > drop probe markers to find coordinates > add text > add checkmarks > move elements > take a screenshot anytime to check their own work > ... etc So it's vision + spatial reasoning + tool use + long context, all at once. Small models (Qwen, Gemma) can't really complete this test, so I skipped them. What happened: > Kimi nailed name, DOB, ID, gender, marital status, nationality, email, phone, address, postal code — placement slightly loose, but content correct. 15 turns. Clean. > Step got maybe half right — fields dropped, "United States" landed in the email line, data floating outside boxes. Burned 1.24M input tokens doing it (81 turns of re-reading the canvas). > Gemini almost got there visually... then spiraled. By turn 40 it was issuing a delete_elements call wiping element IDs 365–425, basically erasing its own work. 31 minutes, 489k output tokens, still streaming. Terminated. The takeaway isn't "Gemini bad." This test is indeed difficult. But token efficiency is capability now. A model that needs 30x the tokens and still can't converge is going to be 30x the cost in production. Kimi K2.6 just quietly did the thing.
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I designed a new test specifically for multimodal models: fill out a paper form. And it's much harder than it sounds. This isn't typing into an electronic field that captures your text. The form is just an image. The model has to place each form element: text, checkmarks — at the correct pixel position on the canvas itself. Results: 🟢 Kimi K2.6 → done in 3:45, 16.7k output tokens 🟡 Step 3.7 Flash → half the fields, 57k output tokens 🔴 Gemini 3.5 Flash → 489k output tokens, never finished. I had to kill it. Gemini burned ~29x more output tokens than Kimi on the exact same task, and Kimi's was the only form that actually looked filled out. The test, a mocked application form, contains some challenging parts, such as one-character-per-box fields. I provided every model the same set of tools: > get canvas size > drop probe markers to find coordinates > add text > add checkmarks > move elements > take a screenshot anytime to check their own work > ... etc So it's vision + spatial reasoning + tool use + long context, all at once. Small models (Qwen, Gemma) can't really complete this test, so I skipped them. What happened: > Kimi nailed name, DOB, ID, gender, marital status, nationality, email, phone, address, postal code — placement slightly loose, but content correct. 15 turns. Clean. > Step got maybe half right — fields dropped, "United States" landed in the email line, data floating outside boxes. Burned 1.24M input tokens doing it (81 turns of re-reading the canvas). > Gemini almost got there visually... then spiraled. By turn 40 it was issuing a delete_elements call wiping element IDs 365–425, basically erasing its own work. 31 minutes, 489k output tokens, still streaming. Terminated. The takeaway isn't "Gemini bad." This test is indeed difficult. But token efficiency is capability now. A model that needs 30x the tokens and still can't converge is going to be 30x the cost in production. Kimi K2.6 just quietly did the thing.

stevibe

25,455 views • 2 months ago

Anthropic's in trouble, again. The entire Claude experience is now available at 1/6th the price. Kimi now does everything Claude does, powered by K2.6, a 1-trillion-parameter MoE model that activates only 32B parameters per token. It covers all three features Claude has (Chat, Code, and Cowork): 1) Kimi Chat runs in four modes - Instant for fast responses - Thinking for deep reasoning - Agent for multi-step execution - and Agent Swarm for parallel workloads. There's a 262K context window across all of them. 2) Kimi Code is the open-source CLI coding agent with K2.6 as the default backend. K2.6 ranked #1 on OpenRouter's programming leaderboard by weekly usage. 3) Kimi Agent is the Cowork equivalent. It generates: - full websites with database and auth - presentation decks (editable PPTX output) - spreadsheets with formulas and charts - word docs and structured research reports. On top of this, Kimi K2.6 is also trained to decompose tasks into up to 300 parallel sub-agents. This helps it retain coherence even across 4,000+ tool calls in a single run, with sessions sustaining up to 13 hours. On SWE-Bench Pro: - Kimi K2.6 → 58.6 - GPT-5.4 xhigh → 57.7 - Gemini 3.1 Pro → 54.2 - Claude Opus 4.6 → 53.4 Kimi K2.6 model is open weights and self-hostable on 4x H100s in INT4. Find the link to the HuggingFace model page in the replies!
0:41

Anthropic's in trouble, again. The entire Claude experience is now available at 1/6th the price. Kimi now does everything Claude does, powered by K2.6, a 1-trillion-parameter MoE model that activates only 32B parameters per token. It covers all three features Claude has (Chat, Code, and Cowork): 1) Kimi Chat runs in four modes - Instant for fast responses - Thinking for deep reasoning - Agent for multi-step execution - and Agent Swarm for parallel workloads. There's a 262K context window across all of them. 2) Kimi Code is the open-source CLI coding agent with K2.6 as the default backend. K2.6 ranked #1 on OpenRouter's programming leaderboard by weekly usage. 3) Kimi Agent is the Cowork equivalent. It generates: - full websites with database and auth - presentation decks (editable PPTX output) - spreadsheets with formulas and charts - word docs and structured research reports. On top of this, Kimi K2.6 is also trained to decompose tasks into up to 300 parallel sub-agents. This helps it retain coherence even across 4,000+ tool calls in a single run, with sessions sustaining up to 13 hours. On SWE-Bench Pro: - Kimi K2.6 → 58.6 - GPT-5.4 xhigh → 57.7 - Gemini 3.1 Pro → 54.2 - Claude Opus 4.6 → 53.4 Kimi K2.6 model is open weights and self-hostable on 4x H100s in INT4. Find the link to the HuggingFace model page in the replies!

Avi Chawla

110,057 views • 3 months ago

I have been testing DeepSeek-V4-Pro with the Pi coding agent. I am mindblown by how well it works out of the box. A few notes: I spent a few hours building an LLM wiki with an agent powered entirely by DeepSeek-V4-Pro on Fireworks inference. This is the first time I feel like there is an open-weight model that can reason at the level of Claude and Codex. And it does this in a cost-effective way with support for 1M context length. To be clear, I am using DeepSeek-V4-Pro inside of Pi without any special configuration. It works out of the box. It's exciting that there is a model that can just be plugged into a basic harness like Pi, and it just works. I've never seen that before. Most models require lots of configuration and setup. DeepSeek's DeepSeek-V4-Pro is clearly good at agentic coding (probably the best from the open-weight models), but the model is also great on knowledge-intensive tasks where reasoning matters. The agent pulled agentic engineering best practices from different company docs (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Stripe, Meta, Modal, DeepSeek, Mistral, Cohere), searched and digested Reddit and HN threads, summarized arxiv papers, and surfaced trending GitHub repos. Then it distilled everything into actionable tips across categories. I love the Wiki it built. The quality is really good. Here is a snapshot of what the wiki looks like: DeepSeek-V4-Pro handled the task without breaking stride. Multi-step research queries, code generation for scaffolding, context-heavy reasoning across disparate sources. For coding specifically, this is the first open-weight model that genuinely feels like a Codex or Claude Code experience. It compares in capability and actual multi-turn agentic work. What made the loop feel so responsive was Fireworks' inference speed (the fastest in the market) and the fact that they actually validate models at the systems level before shipping. No corrupted reasoning traces. Just fast, reliable iteration. The hybrid CSA and HCA attention design cuts KV cache to just 10% and inference FLOPs by nearly 4x at 1M-token context. This is what makes the agent loop actually fast and cheap enough to run in practice. For devs who've been watching open-weight models close the gap but haven't found one that actually delivers in practice, this is the closest I've seen. Try it here:
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I have been testing DeepSeek-V4-Pro with the Pi coding agent. I am mindblown by how well it works out of the box. A few notes: I spent a few hours building an LLM wiki with an agent powered entirely by DeepSeek-V4-Pro on Fireworks inference. This is the first time I feel like there is an open-weight model that can reason at the level of Claude and Codex. And it does this in a cost-effective way with support for 1M context length. To be clear, I am using DeepSeek-V4-Pro inside of Pi without any special configuration. It works out of the box. It's exciting that there is a model that can just be plugged into a basic harness like Pi, and it just works. I've never seen that before. Most models require lots of configuration and setup. DeepSeek's DeepSeek-V4-Pro is clearly good at agentic coding (probably the best from the open-weight models), but the model is also great on knowledge-intensive tasks where reasoning matters. The agent pulled agentic engineering best practices from different company docs (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Stripe, Meta, Modal, DeepSeek, Mistral, Cohere), searched and digested Reddit and HN threads, summarized arxiv papers, and surfaced trending GitHub repos. Then it distilled everything into actionable tips across categories. I love the Wiki it built. The quality is really good. Here is a snapshot of what the wiki looks like: DeepSeek-V4-Pro handled the task without breaking stride. Multi-step research queries, code generation for scaffolding, context-heavy reasoning across disparate sources. For coding specifically, this is the first open-weight model that genuinely feels like a Codex or Claude Code experience. It compares in capability and actual multi-turn agentic work. What made the loop feel so responsive was Fireworks' inference speed (the fastest in the market) and the fact that they actually validate models at the systems level before shipping. No corrupted reasoning traces. Just fast, reliable iteration. The hybrid CSA and HCA attention design cuts KV cache to just 10% and inference FLOPs by nearly 4x at 1M-token context. This is what makes the agent loop actually fast and cheap enough to run in practice. For devs who've been watching open-weight models close the gap but haven't found one that actually delivers in practice, this is the closest I've seen. Try it here:

elvis

60,091 views • 3 months ago

Cerebras inference is very fast. So fast that it changes how we think about configuring our LLMs for voice agent use cases. Kimi K2.6 is a 1T parameter reasoning model that Cerebras serves at 650 - 1,000 tokens per second (end-to-end throughput), with time to first token metrics as low as 150ms (latency). These numbers are two to three times faster than other similarly capable models. The biggest lever we get from this kind of speed is that we can use the model in reasoning mode, and still have excellent "time to first non-thinking token." This solves a big pain point we have in 2026 for voice agent use cases. Almost all recent innovation in post-training has focused on making models good at reasoning ("test time compute"). This is great, but it makes the user-facing model latency much, much slower. Which is a problem for conversational voice agents. We can run Kimi K2.6 with reasoning turned on, and get responses faster than other models produce with reasoning disabled. On my 30-turn voice agent benchmark, Kimi K2.6 with reasoning enabled ties GPT 5.1 and Haiku 4.5 with reasoning disabled, and is still about 200ms seconds faster! On my primary task agent benchmark, Kimi K2.6 is now the #2 model. It ranks just behind Gemini 3.5 Flash in "high" reasoning mode, and tied with GLM 5, Sonnet 4.6, and GPT 5.4 with reasoning set to "low." But Kimi K2.6 completes each turn in the agent loop in under 500ms. The other four models are all at least 3x slower. (Models only qualify for this benchmark if they can complete task turns at a P50 <4s.) A couple of other things that this speed buys us, for production voice agents: - Tool calls happen fast enough that we don't have to work around tool call latency in our pipeline design. - We can prompt the model to output structured data at the beginning of a response, followed by plain text for voice generation. This opens up possibilities like asking the model to do complex classification/generation tasks that influence the rest of the pipeline. For example, the model could create a detailed style prompt for a steerable TTS model, for each individual conversation turn. And, of course, you can use Kimi K2.6 with reasoning turned off. Cerebras calls this "instant" mode. Here's a video of a Cerebras Kimi K2.6 voice agent with voice-to-voice response time, measured at the client, under 500ms. This is the true response latency as perceived by the user, including all network and audio codec overhead, transcription and turn detection, Kimi K2.6 token generation, and voice generation. 500ms is, effectively, instant. So the Cerebras naming for this mode is a propos. :-)
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Cerebras inference is very fast. So fast that it changes how we think about configuring our LLMs for voice agent use cases. Kimi K2.6 is a 1T parameter reasoning model that Cerebras serves at 650 - 1,000 tokens per second (end-to-end throughput), with time to first token metrics as low as 150ms (latency). These numbers are two to three times faster than other similarly capable models. The biggest lever we get from this kind of speed is that we can use the model in reasoning mode, and still have excellent "time to first non-thinking token." This solves a big pain point we have in 2026 for voice agent use cases. Almost all recent innovation in post-training has focused on making models good at reasoning ("test time compute"). This is great, but it makes the user-facing model latency much, much slower. Which is a problem for conversational voice agents. We can run Kimi K2.6 with reasoning turned on, and get responses faster than other models produce with reasoning disabled. On my 30-turn voice agent benchmark, Kimi K2.6 with reasoning enabled ties GPT 5.1 and Haiku 4.5 with reasoning disabled, and is still about 200ms seconds faster! On my primary task agent benchmark, Kimi K2.6 is now the #2 model. It ranks just behind Gemini 3.5 Flash in "high" reasoning mode, and tied with GLM 5, Sonnet 4.6, and GPT 5.4 with reasoning set to "low." But Kimi K2.6 completes each turn in the agent loop in under 500ms. The other four models are all at least 3x slower. (Models only qualify for this benchmark if they can complete task turns at a P50 <4s.) A couple of other things that this speed buys us, for production voice agents: - Tool calls happen fast enough that we don't have to work around tool call latency in our pipeline design. - We can prompt the model to output structured data at the beginning of a response, followed by plain text for voice generation. This opens up possibilities like asking the model to do complex classification/generation tasks that influence the rest of the pipeline. For example, the model could create a detailed style prompt for a steerable TTS model, for each individual conversation turn. And, of course, you can use Kimi K2.6 with reasoning turned off. Cerebras calls this "instant" mode. Here's a video of a Cerebras Kimi K2.6 voice agent with voice-to-voice response time, measured at the client, under 500ms. This is the true response latency as perceived by the user, including all network and audio codec overhead, transcription and turn detection, Kimi K2.6 token generation, and voice generation. 500ms is, effectively, instant. So the Cerebras naming for this mode is a propos. :-)

kwindla

40,593 views • 2 months ago

$50 free credits for GLM 5.2, KIMI 2.7, and DeepSeek V4 Pro. No promo most people know about. Your buddy pays $20/mo for Claude Pro and burns through it in a week. > You get $50 in credits on Aiand for models that actually beat Sonnet on code benchmarks - and the balance barely moves. Inside: → GLM 5.2 - the model that shipped with better coding scores than closed frontier → KIMI K2.7 Code - long-context beast, sits at the top of open leaderboards → DeepSeek V4 Pro - reasoning at a fraction of GPT-5.6 cost → OpenAI-compatible endpoint - plug into any agent, IDE, or tool you already run Setup, 5 steps: → aiand(.)com → Sign up with Google or GitHub → If the page won't load, switch to an EU VPN and retry → Top right corner - click Credits, select $50 → In Stripe checkout, apply promo code: UNITABETAI → $50 lands. Start firing prompts. Balance drains slowly. I've been running agents on it for days and barely dented it. The promo code is valid as of the time of publication Bookmark this before they cap the promo.
0:41

$50 free credits for GLM 5.2, KIMI 2.7, and DeepSeek V4 Pro. No promo most people know about. Your buddy pays $20/mo for Claude Pro and burns through it in a week. > You get $50 in credits on Aiand for models that actually beat Sonnet on code benchmarks - and the balance barely moves. Inside: → GLM 5.2 - the model that shipped with better coding scores than closed frontier → KIMI K2.7 Code - long-context beast, sits at the top of open leaderboards → DeepSeek V4 Pro - reasoning at a fraction of GPT-5.6 cost → OpenAI-compatible endpoint - plug into any agent, IDE, or tool you already run Setup, 5 steps: → aiand(.)com → Sign up with Google or GitHub → If the page won't load, switch to an EU VPN and retry → Top right corner - click Credits, select $50 → In Stripe checkout, apply promo code: UNITABETAI → $50 lands. Start firing prompts. Balance drains slowly. I've been running agents on it for days and barely dented it. The promo code is valid as of the time of publication Bookmark this before they cap the promo.

Atenov int.

14,619 views • 1 month ago

Pi Agent vs OpenCode token usage A lot of people recommended Pi Agent so I decided to check Pi Agent took 1.1k tokens in first turn OpenCode took 11.5k Setup: 1) Trimmed OpenCode (from usual 30k first turn to 11.5k) - 0 MCPs - 2 lightweight plugins (opencode-env-protect and openslimedit) - 8k char AGENTS.md - 11585 deepseek-v4-flash input tokens - for $0.0016 2) Vanilla Pi - 0 MCPs - 0 system prompt - 8k char AGENTS.md - 1114 kimi-k2.6 input tokens - for $0.0008 I think using better models with capped tokens per turn can keep usage nearly the same as uncontrolled DeepSeek V4 Flash? The challenge now is finding the sweet spot. Can't cap tokens if quality drops. We'll see. Video below - OpenCode vs Pi side by side "say hi back" first turns test, with OpenCode Go usage for each
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Pi Agent vs OpenCode token usage A lot of people recommended Pi Agent so I decided to check Pi Agent took 1.1k tokens in first turn OpenCode took 11.5k Setup: 1) Trimmed OpenCode (from usual 30k first turn to 11.5k) - 0 MCPs - 2 lightweight plugins (opencode-env-protect and openslimedit) - 8k char AGENTS.md - 11585 deepseek-v4-flash input tokens - for $0.0016 2) Vanilla Pi - 0 MCPs - 0 system prompt - 8k char AGENTS.md - 1114 kimi-k2.6 input tokens - for $0.0008 I think using better models with capped tokens per turn can keep usage nearly the same as uncontrolled DeepSeek V4 Flash? The challenge now is finding the sweet spot. Can't cap tokens if quality drops. We'll see. Video below - OpenCode vs Pi side by side "say hi back" first turns test, with OpenCode Go usage for each

raymel 👋

201,405 views • 3 months ago

small local model that falls apart in bloated agents like openclaw just runs like a wild horse in hermes agent. and that's not even my line, someone else called it that, i've just been quietly pointing people at this harness for months because it held up on everything i threw at it, 3b models all the way to one trillion params. watch this happen on my own machine. i pointed hermes agent at a local http endpoint, gemma 4 12b on my 3090 llama.cpp server, and it auto-detected the model and started working immediately. no config wrestling, no broken tool calls, no babysitting the output format, i typed in a url and it just went. the whole clip is exactly that, start to finish, no errors, no retries, butter smooth. and the tool calling, the one thing that quietly breaks most local setups, works here like it's nothing. it's not the model that's flaky, it's the harness around it. hermes agent is the first agent i've run that actually gets that right. one url, one local model on one card, and it runs like a wild horse.
1:46

small local model that falls apart in bloated agents like openclaw just runs like a wild horse in hermes agent. and that's not even my line, someone else called it that, i've just been quietly pointing people at this harness for months because it held up on everything i threw at it, 3b models all the way to one trillion params. watch this happen on my own machine. i pointed hermes agent at a local http endpoint, gemma 4 12b on my 3090 llama.cpp server, and it auto-detected the model and started working immediately. no config wrestling, no broken tool calls, no babysitting the output format, i typed in a url and it just went. the whole clip is exactly that, start to finish, no errors, no retries, butter smooth. and the tool calling, the one thing that quietly breaks most local setups, works here like it's nothing. it's not the model that's flaky, it's the harness around it. hermes agent is the first agent i've run that actually gets that right. one url, one local model on one card, and it runs like a wild horse.

Sudo su

27,339 views • 2 months ago

Qwen3.5-35B with only 3B active parameters This MoE model runs FASTER than most 7B dense models. Tested on 3 generations of NVIDIA: - 5090: 137 tok/s - 4090: 112 tok/s - 3090: 78 tok/s The surprise? The 4090 &lt;&gt; 5090 gap is only 22%. With a 3B active MoE, even old GPUs fly.
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Qwen3.5-35B with only 3B active parameters This MoE model runs FASTER than most 7B dense models. Tested on 3 generations of NVIDIA: - 5090: 137 tok/s - 4090: 112 tok/s - 3090: 78 tok/s The surprise? The 4090 &lt;&gt; 5090 gap is only 22%. With a 3B active MoE, even old GPUs fly.

stevibe

69,532 views • 5 months ago

The AI price war is ON. > DeepSeek just dropped V4 Flash 0731 (big capability jump, $0.28/M output) > OpenAI cut GPT-5.6 Luna by 80% to $1.20/M (OpenRouter is currently offering 50% off, bringing it to $0.60/M) Same budget tier now, so I ran both through 3 canvas tests: 🧊 Rubik's cube: DeepSeek nails every rotation. Luna's turns are buggy, stickers fly off mid-move. 🎆 Fireworks: both fine, but Luna lags hard when the burst explodes. 🖊️ Pen writing "Hello": neither is legible. DeepSeek's cursive is looser, but Luna gave up on animating, it rendered a static image. GPT-5.6 is great at coding — but IMO only on Sol. In the same pricing tier, DeepSeek clearly beats Luna.
0:32

The AI price war is ON. > DeepSeek just dropped V4 Flash 0731 (big capability jump, $0.28/M output) > OpenAI cut GPT-5.6 Luna by 80% to $1.20/M (OpenRouter is currently offering 50% off, bringing it to $0.60/M) Same budget tier now, so I ran both through 3 canvas tests: 🧊 Rubik's cube: DeepSeek nails every rotation. Luna's turns are buggy, stickers fly off mid-move. 🎆 Fireworks: both fine, but Luna lags hard when the burst explodes. 🖊️ Pen writing "Hello": neither is legible. DeepSeek's cursive is looser, but Luna gave up on animating, it rendered a static image. GPT-5.6 is great at coding — but IMO only on Sol. In the same pricing tier, DeepSeek clearly beats Luna.

stevibe

270,146 views • 18 days ago

I gave Kimi K2.6 and K2.7 Code the exact same prompt to animate a letter burning to ash. Pure HTML canvas, zero libraries.
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I gave Kimi K2.6 and K2.7 Code the exact same prompt to animate a letter burning to ash. Pure HTML canvas, zero libraries.

stevibe

89,982 views • 2 months ago

China just made Silicon Valley's entire AI industry look like a scam. The US government spent 3 years trying to stop China from building competitive AI. But this backfired HORRIBLY. Here's what happened: Yesterday, a Chinese startup called DeepSeek released a new AI model called V4. It matches the performance of OpenAI and Anthropic's best models. At 1/7th the price. And for the first time ever, it was built on Chinese chips. NOT American ones. That last part is the one that terrifies the west. For context: Since 2022, the US has banned the export of advanced AI chips to China. The entire strategy was built on the assumption that if China can't access Nvidia's best hardware, they can't build frontier AI. But DeepSeek just proved that assumption wrong. Their V4 model was trained and runs on Huawei's Ascend chips. Huawei spent months working directly with DeepSeek to make sure V4 runs across their entire line of AI processors. Jensen Huang even predicted this on a recent podcast: "The day that DeepSeek comes out on Huawei first, that is a horrible outcome for our nation." That day was yesterday. And the numbers are crazy: DeepSeek V4 costs $3.48 per million output tokens. OpenAI's latest model GPT-5.5 costs $30. Anthropic's Claude charges $25. Same ballpark performance. 7x cheaper. Uber's CTO just admitted they burned through their ENTIRE 2026 AI budget in 4 months using Anthropic's tools. If Uber had used DeepSeek instead, that same budget would have lasted 7 YEARS. 4 months vs 7 years. Same work getting done. But the pricing isn't even the big thing here. The real story is what DeepSeek did with their technical report: They published the benchmarks where they LOSE. Every AI company cherry-picks the tests where their model wins. DeepSeek ran the full comparison against GPT-5.4 and Google's Gemini, found they trail frontier models by 3 to 6 months, and printed it anyway. They literally don't care because the price gap makes the performance gap irrelevant for 90% of use cases. So the US export controls didn't slow China down. They ACCELERATED China's independence. Because Chinese developers were FORCED to train models with limited resources, they had to figure out how to make AI radically more efficient. That constraint became their competitive advantage. Every generation of DeepSeek has gotten dramatically cheaper to train. V4 continues the trend. Meanwhile US companies are going the OPPOSITE direction: OpenAI's GPT-5.5 Pro costs $180 per million output tokens. That's 51x more expensive than DeepSeek V4 for comparable work. The Commerce Secretary confirmed this week that ZERO Nvidia advanced chip shipments have actually gone through to China despite being approved in January. So China built frontier AI anyway. Without American chips. At a fraction of the cost. And the market response tells you everything: Chinese chipmaker SMIC surged 10%. Huahong Semiconductor jumped 15%. DeepSeek's Chinese AI competitors Zhipu AI and MiniMax dropped 9% because V4 is destroying them too. DeepSeek is making Silicon Valley's pricing model look like a scam. US tech companies spent $650 billion on AI infrastructure this year. DeepSeek just showed the world you can match their output for pennies. The export controls were supposed to be America's ace card. Instead they taught China how to win without American chips, at American prices nobody can compete with. Jensen Huang was right. This is a horrible outcome. But it's the outcome America built for itself.
1:06

China just made Silicon Valley's entire AI industry look like a scam. The US government spent 3 years trying to stop China from building competitive AI. But this backfired HORRIBLY. Here's what happened: Yesterday, a Chinese startup called DeepSeek released a new AI model called V4. It matches the performance of OpenAI and Anthropic's best models. At 1/7th the price. And for the first time ever, it was built on Chinese chips. NOT American ones. That last part is the one that terrifies the west. For context: Since 2022, the US has banned the export of advanced AI chips to China. The entire strategy was built on the assumption that if China can't access Nvidia's best hardware, they can't build frontier AI. But DeepSeek just proved that assumption wrong. Their V4 model was trained and runs on Huawei's Ascend chips. Huawei spent months working directly with DeepSeek to make sure V4 runs across their entire line of AI processors. Jensen Huang even predicted this on a recent podcast: "The day that DeepSeek comes out on Huawei first, that is a horrible outcome for our nation." That day was yesterday. And the numbers are crazy: DeepSeek V4 costs $3.48 per million output tokens. OpenAI's latest model GPT-5.5 costs $30. Anthropic's Claude charges $25. Same ballpark performance. 7x cheaper. Uber's CTO just admitted they burned through their ENTIRE 2026 AI budget in 4 months using Anthropic's tools. If Uber had used DeepSeek instead, that same budget would have lasted 7 YEARS. 4 months vs 7 years. Same work getting done. But the pricing isn't even the big thing here. The real story is what DeepSeek did with their technical report: They published the benchmarks where they LOSE. Every AI company cherry-picks the tests where their model wins. DeepSeek ran the full comparison against GPT-5.4 and Google's Gemini, found they trail frontier models by 3 to 6 months, and printed it anyway. They literally don't care because the price gap makes the performance gap irrelevant for 90% of use cases. So the US export controls didn't slow China down. They ACCELERATED China's independence. Because Chinese developers were FORCED to train models with limited resources, they had to figure out how to make AI radically more efficient. That constraint became their competitive advantage. Every generation of DeepSeek has gotten dramatically cheaper to train. V4 continues the trend. Meanwhile US companies are going the OPPOSITE direction: OpenAI's GPT-5.5 Pro costs $180 per million output tokens. That's 51x more expensive than DeepSeek V4 for comparable work. The Commerce Secretary confirmed this week that ZERO Nvidia advanced chip shipments have actually gone through to China despite being approved in January. So China built frontier AI anyway. Without American chips. At a fraction of the cost. And the market response tells you everything: Chinese chipmaker SMIC surged 10%. Huahong Semiconductor jumped 15%. DeepSeek's Chinese AI competitors Zhipu AI and MiniMax dropped 9% because V4 is destroying them too. DeepSeek is making Silicon Valley's pricing model look like a scam. US tech companies spent $650 billion on AI infrastructure this year. DeepSeek just showed the world you can match their output for pennies. The export controls were supposed to be America's ace card. Instead they taught China how to win without American chips, at American prices nobody can compete with. Jensen Huang was right. This is a horrible outcome. But it's the outcome America built for itself.

Ricardo

280,891 views • 3 months ago

Chinese AI models are wiping billions off Big Tech right now. Google just lost $200 billion in a single day, and the model it needed to fight back still isn't ready. Gemini 3.5 Pro, Google's most powerful model, is months behind schedule. Alphabet stock dropped 4.4% that same day. The Deepseek moment is happening again, and the new model is FAR bigger. On the same day Google's delay leaked, a Beijing lab called Moonshot released Kimi K3. It is the largest open model ever built, with 2.8 trillion parameters. It took the number one spot on the Frontend Code Arena, a live coding leaderboard, passing Anthropic's best model. And Moonshot is giving it away for free on July 27. The genius part: Anyone with enough computers can download it and run a frontier level AI without paying a cent to a US company. A single task on Kimi K3 costs about 94 cents. The same work on some American models costs nearly double. So why would a company keep paying premium prices for a model it can now get for free? The entire US AI business is built on selling access to models that cost billions to train. If a free Chinese version does most of the same work, that pricing power starts to crack. And Kimi is close to the best. On one closely watched intelligence ranking it scored 57, just behind the top American models GPT-5.6 Sol and Fable 5, and ahead of Claude Opus 4.8. Bank of America told clients that Kimi proves Chinese labs can keep making big leaps even with limited chips. And the founder of Moonshot, Yang Zhilin, learned to build AI as a researcher INSIDE Google. Google literally wrote the 2017 paper that made all of these models possible. Now the people who studied its work are using it to destroy Google, and handing it out for free. What happens next: Kimi K3's weights go public on July 27. Google reports earnings on July 22, and everyone will be asking the same question about Gemini. If free models keep topping the charts, every valuation built on paid AI access has to be rewritten. What do you think?
1:10

Chinese AI models are wiping billions off Big Tech right now. Google just lost $200 billion in a single day, and the model it needed to fight back still isn't ready. Gemini 3.5 Pro, Google's most powerful model, is months behind schedule. Alphabet stock dropped 4.4% that same day. The Deepseek moment is happening again, and the new model is FAR bigger. On the same day Google's delay leaked, a Beijing lab called Moonshot released Kimi K3. It is the largest open model ever built, with 2.8 trillion parameters. It took the number one spot on the Frontend Code Arena, a live coding leaderboard, passing Anthropic's best model. And Moonshot is giving it away for free on July 27. The genius part: Anyone with enough computers can download it and run a frontier level AI without paying a cent to a US company. A single task on Kimi K3 costs about 94 cents. The same work on some American models costs nearly double. So why would a company keep paying premium prices for a model it can now get for free? The entire US AI business is built on selling access to models that cost billions to train. If a free Chinese version does most of the same work, that pricing power starts to crack. And Kimi is close to the best. On one closely watched intelligence ranking it scored 57, just behind the top American models GPT-5.6 Sol and Fable 5, and ahead of Claude Opus 4.8. Bank of America told clients that Kimi proves Chinese labs can keep making big leaps even with limited chips. And the founder of Moonshot, Yang Zhilin, learned to build AI as a researcher INSIDE Google. Google literally wrote the 2017 paper that made all of these models possible. Now the people who studied its work are using it to destroy Google, and handing it out for free. What happens next: Kimi K3's weights go public on July 27. Google reports earnings on July 22, and everyone will be asking the same question about Gemini. If free models keep topping the charts, every valuation built on paid AI access has to be rewritten. What do you think?

Ricardo

47,790 views • 28 days ago

HERMES AGENT SUPPORTS 300+ MODELS. PICKING THE RIGHT ONE PER TASK IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN $5/MONTH AND $50. STARTING OUT: Claude Sonnet 4.6. official recommendation from Nous Research. "the model this project was built and tested with." strong reasoning. reliable tool calling. mid-range pricing. PREMIUM TIER: Claude Opus 4.8. best coding benchmarks available. self-correcting reasoning. catches its own mistakes. 1M context. use for demanding tasks where quality matters. GPT-5.5. #1 Chatbot Arena. #1 GPQA Diamond reasoning (94.1%). #1 creative writing. 2M context. handles entire codebases in one pass. Grok 4.30. the only frontier model with live X firehose access. real-time social data, breaking news, market sentiment. connects via Grok OAuth. no separate API key. Grok-Composer-2.5-Fast (v0.17.0). Cursor's coding model. 200K context. available through your Grok subscription via OAuth. no extra cost if you already pay for Grok. MID-RANGE TIER: Claude Sonnet 4.6. best balance of quality and cost for daily use. strongest prose and tool calling in this tier. Gemini 2.5 Pro. Google Search grounding built in. cites sources. verifies claims. pulls current data. 2M context. best for research-heavy workflows. GPT-4.1. reliable tool calling. solid general reasoning. good middle ground when you need OpenAI compatibility. BUDGET TIER: Claude Haiku 4.5. fastest Anthropic model. cheapest paid Claude option. strong at classification, routing, simple queries. use for auxiliary tasks: compression, vision, web extraction, approval scoring. DeepSeek V4. best cost-to-quality ratio in the market. 90% cache discount on repeated context. use for sub-agents and bulk parallel work. DeepSeek V4 Flash. cheapest paid model worth using. 1M context. MIT license. self-hostable. use for cron jobs, monitoring, routine searches. MiniMax M3. Nous Research and MiniMax collaborating on optimization. 1M context via lightning attention. 59% SWE-Bench Pro. beats several premium models on coding. one of the most-used models inside Hermes. FREE / LOCAL: Qwen 3.5 27B via Ollama. 16GB VRAM. reliable tool calling. best free local model for Hermes as of mid-2026. Qwen 3 8B. 8GB VRAM. fits a $7 VPS. handles routine tasks at zero API cost. Llama 4 Maverick. best open-weight tool calling. 1M context. needs more VRAM but strongest local option. HOW TO ASSIGN MODELS: main model: Desktop app / Dashboard → Models → switch sub-agent model: set in Desktop app, Dashboard, or config.yaml: delegation: model: "deepseek/deepseek-v4" auxiliary models (compression, vision, web extract): Desktop app / Dashboard → Models → Auxiliary Haiku 4.5 or Gemini Flash work well here. saves significantly when your main model is premium. per-profile: each Hermes profile gets its own model. Scout on DeepSeek. Analyst on Sonnet. Briefer on budget model. Coder on Opus. per-cron-job: pin a specific model to any cron job. morning brief on Haiku. deep research on Sonnet. monitoring on DeepSeek Flash. each job uses only the model it needs. per-session: /model deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash hot-swap mid-conversation. no restart needed. FALLBACK CHAINS: if your primary model is unavailable, Hermes automatically switches to the next provider. rate limit or server error = next model in the chain. no failed runs. no manual intervention. set in Desktop app, Dashboard, or config.yaml: fallback_providers: - openrouter - nous - codex PROVIDER PATHS: OPENROUTER: 300+ models under one API key. pay per token. most flexible. NOUS PORTAL: 300+ models + Tool Gateway (web search, image gen, TTS, browser). one OAuth. one subscription. 10% off token-billed providers. CHATGPT SUB: GPT-5.5 + Grok via OAuth. included tokens with $20 subscription. OLLAMA: free. local. private. zero API cost. your hardware only. mix providers across profiles and tasks. Scout on OpenRouter. Analyst on Nous Portal. Coder on ChatGPT sub. Monitor on Ollama. THE RULE: premium for work that needs deep reasoning. mid-range for daily driver tasks. budget for volume and background work. free for monitoring and routine jobs. pricing changes fast. check openrouter ai for current rates before committing. Which is your favourite model and for what task? full 15 levels breakdown in the article 👇
0:51

HERMES AGENT SUPPORTS 300+ MODELS. PICKING THE RIGHT ONE PER TASK IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN $5/MONTH AND $50. STARTING OUT: Claude Sonnet 4.6. official recommendation from Nous Research. "the model this project was built and tested with." strong reasoning. reliable tool calling. mid-range pricing. PREMIUM TIER: Claude Opus 4.8. best coding benchmarks available. self-correcting reasoning. catches its own mistakes. 1M context. use for demanding tasks where quality matters. GPT-5.5. #1 Chatbot Arena. #1 GPQA Diamond reasoning (94.1%). #1 creative writing. 2M context. handles entire codebases in one pass. Grok 4.30. the only frontier model with live X firehose access. real-time social data, breaking news, market sentiment. connects via Grok OAuth. no separate API key. Grok-Composer-2.5-Fast (v0.17.0). Cursor's coding model. 200K context. available through your Grok subscription via OAuth. no extra cost if you already pay for Grok. MID-RANGE TIER: Claude Sonnet 4.6. best balance of quality and cost for daily use. strongest prose and tool calling in this tier. Gemini 2.5 Pro. Google Search grounding built in. cites sources. verifies claims. pulls current data. 2M context. best for research-heavy workflows. GPT-4.1. reliable tool calling. solid general reasoning. good middle ground when you need OpenAI compatibility. BUDGET TIER: Claude Haiku 4.5. fastest Anthropic model. cheapest paid Claude option. strong at classification, routing, simple queries. use for auxiliary tasks: compression, vision, web extraction, approval scoring. DeepSeek V4. best cost-to-quality ratio in the market. 90% cache discount on repeated context. use for sub-agents and bulk parallel work. DeepSeek V4 Flash. cheapest paid model worth using. 1M context. MIT license. self-hostable. use for cron jobs, monitoring, routine searches. MiniMax M3. Nous Research and MiniMax collaborating on optimization. 1M context via lightning attention. 59% SWE-Bench Pro. beats several premium models on coding. one of the most-used models inside Hermes. FREE / LOCAL: Qwen 3.5 27B via Ollama. 16GB VRAM. reliable tool calling. best free local model for Hermes as of mid-2026. Qwen 3 8B. 8GB VRAM. fits a $7 VPS. handles routine tasks at zero API cost. Llama 4 Maverick. best open-weight tool calling. 1M context. needs more VRAM but strongest local option. HOW TO ASSIGN MODELS: main model: Desktop app / Dashboard → Models → switch sub-agent model: set in Desktop app, Dashboard, or config.yaml: delegation: model: "deepseek/deepseek-v4" auxiliary models (compression, vision, web extract): Desktop app / Dashboard → Models → Auxiliary Haiku 4.5 or Gemini Flash work well here. saves significantly when your main model is premium. per-profile: each Hermes profile gets its own model. Scout on DeepSeek. Analyst on Sonnet. Briefer on budget model. Coder on Opus. per-cron-job: pin a specific model to any cron job. morning brief on Haiku. deep research on Sonnet. monitoring on DeepSeek Flash. each job uses only the model it needs. per-session: /model deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash hot-swap mid-conversation. no restart needed. FALLBACK CHAINS: if your primary model is unavailable, Hermes automatically switches to the next provider. rate limit or server error = next model in the chain. no failed runs. no manual intervention. set in Desktop app, Dashboard, or config.yaml: fallback_providers: - openrouter - nous - codex PROVIDER PATHS: OPENROUTER: 300+ models under one API key. pay per token. most flexible. NOUS PORTAL: 300+ models + Tool Gateway (web search, image gen, TTS, browser). one OAuth. one subscription. 10% off token-billed providers. CHATGPT SUB: GPT-5.5 + Grok via OAuth. included tokens with $20 subscription. OLLAMA: free. local. private. zero API cost. your hardware only. mix providers across profiles and tasks. Scout on OpenRouter. Analyst on Nous Portal. Coder on ChatGPT sub. Monitor on Ollama. THE RULE: premium for work that needs deep reasoning. mid-range for daily driver tasks. budget for volume and background work. free for monitoring and routine jobs. pricing changes fast. check openrouter ai for current rates before committing. Which is your favourite model and for what task? full 15 levels breakdown in the article 👇

YanXbt

17,138 views • 1 month ago

I ran a quick test of Gemini Robotics ER 1.5 controlling my LeKiwi using the MCP I developed before. No extra code required - just specified a new model. Unfortunately, it doesn't work well, even though I had expected it to be the best, as it is the first major VLM model trained specifically for robotics applications. The video below is a relatively good attempt. It does understand what is going on and generates a reasonable action plan, but it is not doing well with the low-level control. I guess it was not trained for this and was used together with the VLA, so it is trained to generate more high-level commands like "grab this object and put it there" rather than doing low-level control specifying every robot movement step by step. Did anybody try to use it in a similar setup? What is your experience?
1:11

I ran a quick test of Gemini Robotics ER 1.5 controlling my LeKiwi using the MCP I developed before. No extra code required - just specified a new model. Unfortunately, it doesn't work well, even though I had expected it to be the best, as it is the first major VLM model trained specifically for robotics applications. The video below is a relatively good attempt. It does understand what is going on and generates a reasonable action plan, but it is not doing well with the low-level control. I guess it was not trained for this and was used together with the VLA, so it is trained to generate more high-level commands like "grab this object and put it there" rather than doing low-level control specifying every robot movement step by step. Did anybody try to use it in a similar setup? What is your experience?

Ilia

15,601 views • 10 months ago