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  • Hacker News
  • > AT&T turned to artificial intelligence models from Anthropic and OpenAI in recent years to help with customer service, call transcription and coding. [...]

    > By May, open models accounted for 20 percent of AT&T’s A.I. use. That has since risen to 40 percent and may jump to 60 percent in the coming months, Mr. Markus said in an interview.

    This is missing a crucial detail. We know they "help with customer service, call transcription and coding", but which of those have been upgrade to open models?

    Call transcription is trivial to do with open models. I can run Whisper or Parakeet on a low-spec laptop.

    "Customer service" could mean a lot of things, but it sounds feasible for open models too.

    "Coding" - they might go to open models for that, but I expect the costs involved in paying for closed models for software developers within AT&T are a fraction of the costs involved in transcribing all of their calls or handling aspects of custom service for millions of customers.

    From later in the story:

    > AT&T researches Chinese models but is not using them, Mr. Markus said. Instead, it is working with popular alternatives made by American companies such as the Gemma A.I. model from Google and the Llama A.I. models from Meta.

    Gemma 4 is great, but really, Llama, in 2026?

    by simonw
  • Spent most of today reworking a rack and rig of gpus for all of our internal ai work… our big server is 8 rtx 6000 pro and 3 psu, I definitely feel I made a mistake not upgrading our wall power to 240v but so far we have multiple 30amp 120v and with 3 PSU uninterrupted power we have been very stable. My big upgrade will be moving to epyc motherboard from threadripper so we get gen5x8 with bifurcation instead of what we are stuck with today gen5x4 due to bios limitations . What has been so encouraging though is first deepseek v4 flash at 200+ t/s for single user and much more in aggregate- now on qwen 3.8 flash next for image support and eyes on glm5.3 flash for some testing … next is realistically considering co location and quiet a sizable loan to scale this to real hardware instead of miner rip vibes
    by taf2
  • I'd love to! For real coding though, SOTA models barely get the job done. It wasn't until Opus 4.5 that you could really get decent results.

    I'm sure this will change (and I can't wait for it!) but as of today, open models might be fine for summarizing and writing docs, but you need SOTA to work on code if you want to be competitive.

    by slowin
  • > Some U.S. firms remain reluctant to use Chinese A.I. models because of concerns over regulation and data privacy. AT&T researches Chinese models but is not using them, Mr. Markus said. Instead, it is working with popular alternatives made by American companies such as the Gemma A.I. model from Google and the Llama A.I. models from Meta.

    This makes sense since corporations require legal certainty, and using an open model from an American company (probably) provides them some level of indemnity, and also someone to sue.

    by petcat
  • I swear, Qwen 3.8 27B @ Q8 is smarter than Sonnet 5 most of the time. Why wouldn’t corporate America self host at this point, especially with better options like Deepseek Flash and GLM 5.3 flash that’s a middle ground between Sonnet and Opus
    by syntaxing
  • Open source does not apply to AI and we should discourage anyone from using that term. All the models are opaque and proprietary. You cannot go into any source code and fix bugs, or add features, or study it to learn more. It's not the same thing at all as open source software.
    by krupan
  • Every larger company I talk to these days has an active project on moving away from OpenAI and Anthropic to open models. And they’re actively shifting, as the article says, so the threat is far from theoretical.

    Unless they both dramatically slash prices then they’re in big trouble. Neither of them can afford to do that and both desperately need to convince the street that the opposite will happen if they want any hope at a successful IPO.

    However the cold reality for both is that there is zero moat to a model anymore. It’s a pure commodity. Those selling compute and access to open models are gearing up to wipe the floor with Open AI and Anthropic.

    by cmiles8

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