Re:Qwen3.8-Max: A New Bar for Coding and Cowork
by Bnjoroge on Monday August 03, 2026 @03:16PM
(#49160179)
Huh? V4Flash is still incredibly price competitive. The new version is right around GLM 5.2 and maybe slightly worse than opus 4.8 depending on which benchmark you use while being much cheaper(even factoring how most US zdr providers charge 10x Deepseek’s api caching price). K3 is also a tad behind fable/sol while being alot cheaper
Sure, it’s just the lowest end for now, and the enterprise money is at the top of the market. And there’s protectionism/enterprise lock-in/etc that complicate things somewhat.
But still, if the US AI labs ever tap the training brakes for a millisecond, the “inference is still a money maker” argument seems to evaporate when they’ll immediately have to fight a race to the bottom until margins are virtually nothing.
Or if the benchmaxing “line goes up” FOMO mindset starts to lose its luster and companies find their individual niches for productive use of AI and stop bothering with all the latest and greatest churn for top dollar.
Which might be even worse if it means the training arms race is still ongoing but neither Anthropic or OpenAI want to be the first to “lose”. While the marginal value of each new model training run keeps decreasing and enterprises signal they’re more concerned with cost reductions than solving ARC-AGI-7 puzzles.