“I tend to want to use the most expensive model available always because, like most capitalists, I equate trust with cost.”
Thoughtworks Technology Podcast · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · September 2026
Mugrage said this as an aside while asking his colleagues how far open-weight models now lag the frontier ones. The episode's whole frame was cost — renting closed models by the token versus running open weights yourself — which makes the admission that he picks by price rather than evidence land harder. His guest immediately confessed to the same habit.
Transcript
…electricity. So, your cost per token drops to near zero, you know. So, and that also other technical advantages like the latency is lower, you know, because there will be no round trips on network or third-party servers. Sensitive data stays entirely inside your building on your machine. So, yeah.
…the past year with DeepSeek and the GLM series and the Quinn series, all these models are starting to catch up rapidly to Frontier. And so, now the conversation is shifting away from good model versus bad model and more towards model that somebody runs for you and model that you can run yourself.
How close is that gap now? Because I have to admit, as a user, so I use these things, but I don't deploy them. I tend to want to use the most expensive model available always because, like most capitalists, I equate trust with cost. I mean, what does that margin actually look like as far as efficacy?
I will say I am guilty of only using Fable when it's available to me and not using Opus or Sonnet or Haiku. But what I've noticed recently, over the past few weeks, I started to play with the GLM 5.2 models, which 5.3 has made waves for being almost as good as Fable, if not as good, to the point…
What does it take to run some of these? I mean, like, I early on tried to run some of it on my MacBook, and I have a pretty decent MacBook, you know, 48 gigs of RAM in the big processor, the big GPU. Um, and most of the larger stuff, I couldn't even start. I mean, unless I didn't know what I was…
I will say. These models, the ones that are truly competitive with frontier models like Opus and Fable, we're going to have a hard time running them on a private computer. If you have a specific kind of Mac Pro that has, say, 500 gigs bytes of VRAM available to it, which they exist, but they're…
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