That probably explains why there were so many competitors around withing days of the Jev announcement. They are not starting with a moat, and there doesn't seem to be any moat in sight. Just buzzword recognition because everything is comparing to "jev".
There will always only be a very small percentage of people who want to discover and build things, even with llms, its a very small subset of people though, and most people want off the shelf solutions.
Also Jevs purpose isnt to become its own thing. It will get aquired in 18 months by one of Andressen Horowitz's incestuous circle of companies and everyone will make money, and the person who buys it wont necessarily care if Jev itself makes them a ton of money. They're just passing chips around the table.
Jev is the known idea, but with a slick website with grandiose claims and an impressive Doom demo on. It's also a catchy name - it caught on instantly, but mostly as a shorthand: it's easier to say "Jev" and "like Jev" than "classifier models" (or rather "<descriptive explanation of a specific shape of> classifier models").
Curious, what hosted VPS services people are using these days. I am using hostinger, but I don't intend to continue as 63%-70% discount eventually runs out. Then the real cost hits. Its the lock-in and migration costs that make people shell out the uncomfortable renewal price. Looking for an affordable option without the introductory rug-pull.
I just bought my first VPS plan after deciding not to renew my shared hosting contract.
Racknerd looked to be the preferred option after Hetzner raised their prices based on reading some of the forums/reddit.
I ended up going with "Server Host" based on ram and price.
4gb ram, 28 dollars for the year, and renews annually for that price (no discount expiring games). They initially provisioned it in the wrong region, I sent a support ticket in, and they fixed it same day. So far, so good.
i have used racknerd for years - no fancy features like a real cloud provider, but you get a stable VM for very competitive prices, and they're not super overprovisioned like some cheap providers
Projects like DwarfStar https://github.com/antirez/ds4 really lower the hardware bar a lot so Deepseek 4.1 flash and other mixture of expert models can run on consumer hardware. There are also other inference providers who make their money serving openweight models. Services like OpenRouter make it all too easy to utilize these models. Access to these models isn't hard. The hardware moat is becoming pretty easy to bridge.
More concretely DwarfStar M5 128GB Deepseek 4.1 flash 1K tokens @ 29s, 5K tokens + reasoning @ 147s, 10k token prompt @ 463 tokens/s = 22s. Hardware buy-in USD$7K / AUD$8.5K / EUR€6.8K. At typical workloads, ROI is still poor vs. current-era subsidies, but owning hardware is good for privacy/longevity/connectivity independence. Whether you actually consider Apple hardware 'owned' is a valid and thought provoking question.
Still gonna take 2-3 years to get DeepSeek V4.1 Flash quality at decent speeds on reasonably priced hardware.
Hardware update cycles are 2-3 years even on the high end, so it's still a ways away before "good enough" and "local" belong in the same sentence for the average person.
And by then, DeepSeek V6 Flash will be too cheap to meter, 5x faster, and 10x better, so... You'd still need to go out of your way.
Most people are spending most of their time on their phones anyway. ..
Flash Next is a basically there. It really depends on what you are doing. This model is great. People forget that they felt Opus 4.6 was a great model and now you have it at home.
I do use DS 4.1 flash a good bit. It's only real fault is that it is a very eager model and I have to system prompt it down to a more reasonable level and it will still take initiative, a little more than I would prefer.
I'm giving this a go, and so far, this is great. I have 1x RTX 4090 (24GB VRAM) and 128GB DDR4 RAM. I am seeing > 110 tokens/sec (3 token MTP). Using 60K/260k context currently. So far the results seem at least on par with my Qwen 3.8 q5 27B (~60 TPS). I realize ultimately tokens/sec don't really mean much if the quality sucks, but I am optimistic but still paying close attention to the results.
Working with fast local models can be great. Fast prefill, and >100 TPS is quite quick.
Rails needs hard break from DHH. He has been toxic for the rails community for a long time. I sincerely appreciate his many contributions to rails, and his shaping of rails, but it is beyond time to cut ties. He's clearly not interested in rails any longer.
DHH founded Rails World (as far as I know). What a wonderful way to tell the whole community to F'off than to sell tickets to your conference then tell them not to use the technology. If DHH wants to vibe code everything in rust/assembly or whatever claude tells him to do, let DHH do his own thing, and let's part ways.
If inference continues toward the trend of becoming a commodity, and inference hardware efficiency is doubling every two years, that will likely mean that the price of inference will continue to fall so long as the market is competitive. I don't see how companies investing billions in inference hardware today will see profit in the lifespan of the hardware.
I hope Apple contributes to an open standard for this, instead of keeping this proprietary. In the emerging world of generative AI, we need this more than ever. Not just iPhone, but ideally most camera systems will have some kind of verifiable capture mode.
reply