Even as the article points out, this fluctuates constantly. In a few months, we're guaranteed to get a new batch of open models, and the balance will shift again.

What's more important is that open models can be inspected, they can be customized, and you don't have to worry that a company will decide that you're not allowed to use them for stuff like reverse engineering things or do security work.

That's why open models, and especially ones you can run locally will always be important. When you're renting closed models, you're basically a serf who has no say in how the model can be used.

That's to be expected since all the proprietary models were just released. Give it six months and the Chinese labs will distill from the proprietary models like they did last time.

Despite its simplicity, price-performance is not the only metric; this obsession is a typical consequence of extreme overextension of the Friedman doctrine, and it is why so much software and hardware has been qualitatively shitty even when it matters that it’s not. That something can be measured doesn’t automatically make it preferable as a decision-making basis over intangibles.

Oh really? I have tasks that DeepSeek 4.1 Flash is absolutely murdering everything else on price–performance.

Without knowing which dots are which, this is useless.

Let’s say I want to run qwen 27B or flash next on a machine I own, off solar panels that are also sunk cost.

How did they price the marginal cost of a token? Depreciation on the box + reverse billing opportunity cost with the power company?