How does 397B-A17B compare against frontier? Did anybody try? Probably needs serious HW that most people don't have.

Its an order of magnitude difference in what it can do, mostly because it can verify its own work. It can also use subagents which helps a lot. Large tasks I usually have done by subs with the main agent directing. This means the task they can take on can be much larger.

I like DeepSeek because of their pricing, although I'm still evaluating. I wonder if I'll need a VPN in the future to access it though (from EU). Cheap is good, cheap prevails.

The official DeepSeek API is routed through AWS load balancing btw.

If you own a store and people walk in, you observe this and take a mental note. You know who visits the store. If you sell tokens, you know who buys and what people buy. It's just that now, the metadata (what I buy, when I buy, what I look like) and my intrinsics (my data) are one. I send tokens, get tokens back. If there was a way to round-robin somehow across vendors to control who gets what, I'd do it.

When contracting out manufacturing, it's common sense to spread across manufacturers, so no single manufacturer has everything. They may have half a shell. Or an peripheral module without the core. Or a core without anything around it.

Dutch disease. Govt. just needs to keep the cash cows happy. Everybody else is irrelevant; just critters roaming the land.