You don't need frontier pricing: DeepSeek and GLM flash models can do 90% of your work locally

PMinervini · x · 2026-09-30

Quoting @gneubig: if you're complaining about OpenAI or Claude prices, deepseek-v4.1-flash and glm-5.3-flash can do 90% of your work. There's a place and time for frontier intelligence, but you don't need to pay a boatload for most tasks.

The author backs it up in practice: he ran deepseek-v4.1-flash (Q2 quantized) locally on a laptop, accessed via pi, and shared a screenshot as proof. A practical cost-saving pointer for heavy API users — quantized open models already cover most everyday workloads.

Original post →

More from Models

Models channel →