MiMo Code is now released and open-source (opens in new tab)

> That’s a charity, not a business model.

  Joel Spolsky in 2002 identified a major pattern in technology business & economics: The pattern of "commoditizing your complement", an alternative to vertical integration, where companies seek to secure a choke point or quasi-monopoly in products composed of many necessary & sufficient layers by dominating one layer while fostering so much competition in another layer above or below its layer that no competing monopolist can emerge, prices are driven down to marginal costs elsewhere in the stack, total price drops & increases demand, and the majority of the consumer surplus of the final product can be diverted to the quasi-monopolist.

  No matter how valuable the original may be and how much one could charge for it, it can be more valuable to make it free if it increases profits elsewhere.

  This pattern explains many otherwise odd or apparently self-sabotaging ventures by large tech companies into apparently irrelevant fields, such as the high rate of releasing open-source contributions by many Internet companies or the intrusion of advertising companies into smartphone manufacturing & web browser development & statistical software & fiber-optic networks & municipal WiFi & radio spectrum auctions & DNS: they are pre-emptive attempts to commodify another company elsewhere in the stack, or defenses against it being done to them.

https://gwern.net/complement

On the question of language models and periphery tooling -

Open weight models are disruptive to the business models of closed model businesses. An incentive is if your business is built around X but model training is helpful to you, but you don’t expect to meter it specifically. You can release your models and undercut the exclusive moat of a new model company like OpenAI or Anthropic from becoming at some point a competitor, or holding their access as a chip in pricing negotiations. By opening your architectures and weights other competitors can build on them and newer better models emerge faster decoupled from a small number of proprietary models. This lets you focus on X while gaining overall momentum on your model release at no additional cost and no loss in focus on X, while defending against upstarts and monopolies.

This is effectively a lot of the open source world that comes from corporate development as well. It feels odd after this many decades of discussing corporate reasons to participate in open source we keep rehashing it.

Maybe these things should be utilities that can be swapped out at will and shouldn’t even be privately owned at all? Heresy, I know!

Because there is literally nothing special about coding hardnesses. The models are doing all the lifting. It just user experience that separates them.

A coding hardness with just bash outperforms Codex, Claude Code, OpenCode, Pi ect. The added features are just user experience features.

Public good isn’t a charity, and a business model that doesn’t contribute to the public good should not be allowed to exist.

Because they steal everything to train their models. They literally make you pay for the "commons" knowledge

Yes I do think cloud providers should open source all of their platforms, and this is not charity because it is essentially the hosting that they are providing as a product. Even if, say, google open sources its whole search infrastructure, it does not at all means you can just host your own due to the huge hardware requirements, but you can know(especially after AI which can be utilized to do this) that they are not using your data in a way they shouldnt.

Good will and trust can ultimately have monetary value, and having a funnel based on open source is a viable play if it leads to a service that is sticky.

Cloud providers are commodity, and egress pricing is partially cost following because they have to pay peering to their interconnect points for WAN. Internal networks are not charged within the account because the economics of the VPC overlay are optimized for that use, but inter account and VPC and other boundaries carry cost - especially interconnection between accounts because the way VPC treats virtualization requires a relatively expensive routing. Inter AZ and inter region pricing also exists for the same cost following reasons. They also help shape incentives because it allows them to optimize placement of compute within the same AZ to physical buildings or rings.

The case that is largely nonsense is the egress pricing on direct connects since beyond the circuit costs, which the customer pay, there’s no costs for aws not already on the customer regardless. It also makes DC friction weird in that you are incentivized to NOT move storage before compute.

The capital motivation isn't the only one that exists. You can say something should be true without having a plan to maximize quarterly revenues.

Even if you consider profit motive, what is the profit motive for corporate contributions to open source? The same applies here.

Because Claude Code is literally nothing particularly special. We don't need their business model. They need their business model, and to that I say, tough shit.

> cloud providers should be commodity

They are already.

> and should open source all of their platforms

Most of the cloud platforms are open source. Linux, container, k8s… it’s entirely possible for someone to build and deploy their private cloud if they have the resources.

> and eliminate egress fees

What does it mean? If I sign up for cloud service I am only bound to the contract terms. If I am PAYGO I can switch anytime.

The familiar Chinese recipe for success: Always copy and imitate first, even if it is inferior, always make it cheaper or even free so that the original innovator will be burdened by brutal price competition and much bigger R&D costs and cannot keep up in the long run. Then the copycat will win in the endgame.

They did steal all of our written knowledge

The cloud provider isn't the harness, Terraform/OpenTofu/Pelumi and the abstractions you build using them are. The cloud provider is the LLM. It's not as fungible as the LLM and there's no direct comparison to egress costs of course, but that's moreso a problem with the metaphor.

Well, until you established monopoly you need to build trust. Open Source is one way of doing just that. One of the better ways I would say even...

Do you think Internet Explorer 6.0 was a good decision?

After 16 years on Hacker News, I've come to associate its readership with cheap bastards who think everything should be free while simultaneously wanting to keep their 6-figure jobs.

There's a very strong overlap with male gamers, who also think everything involving sophisticated engineering and design should be cheaper than a cup of coffee.

Just call it out and maybe we can collectively choose to towards a culture that doesn't encourage such shameless behavior or perverted values.

opensourcing software may enable leverage of wider network of contributors to given piece of software,hence software can evolve much more quickly and efficiently.

“A business that does things that customers actually like is a charity” lmao

> Why would a company do any of these things?

What? It’s actually insane that they haven’t yet.

I don’t like changing tools. What engineer does? I want to learn one tool and tune it to my exact preferences. Proprietary vendor tools are not portable and I avoid them.

Either Anthropic or OpenAI could drop the first-to-market open coding harness tomorrow and it would be as big as VSCode, it would be the standard platform everyone builds stuff on.

This ^

> And demand is so high and will stay high,

The question is why supply is restricted, primarily by sanctions and tariffs to China, and the expressed refusal of RAM makers to even think about increasing supply, they are actually all sweaty about China taking a bit of the unrestricted market.

This is the beauty of open source :) KHTML -> WebKit -> Blink is a good example.

Frankly, it's not really more insecure than any other installation method. Apt packages and the like generally have the ability to specify pre/post-install scripts, so `sudo dpkg -i ./random.deb` is equivalent to `sudo bash ./random.sh`. Even if they didn't have pre/post-install scripts, they're still writing arbitrary files to arbitrary locations on your disk, so they can trigger execution the next time you boot or log in or whatever.

And at the end of the day, no matter the installation method (even just unpacking a tarball and executing the program directly from that directory), you're going to run their program on your computer, and then the program can do whatever it wants. Maybe you don't run it with sudo, but https://xkcd.com/1200/ seems relevant.

I use npm 11.16.0 and it did this

npm warn allow-scripts Run `npm approve-scripts --allow-scripts-pending` to review, or `npm approve-scripts <pkg>` to allow.

Isn't executing arbitrary code kind of the entire point of NPM though? Any chance you have a link to something that describes their plans?

And yet, MiMo and DeepSeek, even MiniMax, are way cheaper and arguably better, or way better than both Sonnet and especially Haiku.

While you can argue you are ready to pay 100-1000 times the price for Fable or Opus because you need those last 1-2% of edge, there's no valid reason to keep paying the obscene amounts of money for Sonnet and Haiku when alternatives exist.

Claude Code TUI is garbage. There's nothing worth protecting in there.

Wow. I saw 4.1B credits and thought it was super generous. But my math says the subscription plan gives less value than the API.

For example, API input is $0.435 / M tokens, which works out to 13.79 M tokens for $6.

Plan is 300 credits per input token, which works out to 13.67 M tokens at 4.1B credits per $6.

Very similar math for cache input and output.

Indeed. I did the math and arrived at the same conclusion. They don’t really subsidize their token plans. Maybe because their api pricing is already dirt cheap

>Looks like they have very effective collaboration with DeepSeek and Kimi.

The collaboration is informal. People don’t seem to realize this, but the Chinese internet for programmers and developers today feels a lot like StackExchange in its heyday. There’s a huge emphasis on sharing knowledge, because sharing what you know builds your profile, and becoming a rockstar in a subfield is one of the only ways to get ahead.

Competition in China is ruthless. But unlike in North America, where individuals are often bound by agreement to hoard knowledge because it can give them a competitive edge, the competitive advantage in China is building face and peer recognition. And that comes from proving that you are worthy of being a "master/teacher", and that extends to the valuation of your knowledge business. For example, the third wave coffee shops in China, the master roaster is often called "master/teacher" once they win a roasting competition and start sharing new knowledge of roasting in the public sphere, and that's a title of sincere respect.

You can see parallels with those that apply to give talks at conferences and post snazzy technical presentations they give in the US, but the bar for what qualifies as new knowledge is far higher in China because there's a massive ecosystem of people rushing to outcompete what you have to offer, and once the ball gets rolling on knowledge sharing, lots of people will go off and build upon that knowledge or try to build businesses on top of that, which in turn produces more knowledge.

Reading developer forums in China, once you crack the code (I find Gemini will get you a good chunk of the way with good translations), they are really quite far ahead with what they're willing to share. And I suspect in great part, the decision to release open-weights is heavily tied to that concept of building face/peer recognition = building valuations.

> Looks like they have very effective collaboration with DeepSeek and Kimi. Those three models have been bouncing ideas and sharing R&D innovation, which made all of them improve very fast.

Very fascinating to learn this, didn't know Moonshoot (Kimi) also collaborated with others. I think I read in another post that DeepSeek and Qwen team shared the same building? So that kind of explains it.

> Based solely on quality and price, OpenAI, Anthropic, and other western models just can't compete with the new generation of Chinese open models.

I have to agree. I had the great opportunity to take the offer Z.ai had with their Christmas deal, their lite plan was 3 months for 7$. GLM-4.7 was already impressive enough.

When they released GLM-5-Turbo and GLM-5.1, that is when I came to the realization of how close the gap is between proprietary western models and Chinese open-weight ones (not all of them are ofc).

I could barely believe how good GLM-5.1 was, I didn't think I was using it in CC and had to check the settings again. It's astonishing how close the gap is now, and this competition benefits us very much, the pricing is so low atm, its amazing.

I find deepseek-v4-pro to be every bit as good as sonnet tbh

GLM 5.1 is stronger than Sonnet 4.6 in my opinion, but while they have a coding plan that is a good value MiMo beats it on price. I haven't used MiMo much yet but it felt pretty similar.

Is there a guide to running these models locally? Sonnet level inference on my own hardware would be world changing.

I have Claude but I don't want to ask it because Anthropic could decide to sabotage me.

I found it relevant and actually just the information I was looking for. Having a highly recommended model behind the tool makes it worth further investigation.

Uh, what model do you think this is using?

He didn't say MiMo Code

Sorry for confusion. I indeed meant the model itself.

The cache situation has definitely improved. Not as good as DeepSeeks, but no longer totally broken.

The 4.1 Gazillion credits is disingenuous.

It takes 200!!! hyper-inflation credits for ONE single token of uncached input.

Xiaomi had an issue, and instead of owning it, they covered it up with "look, now you get ALL THE (near worthless) CREDITS!!!!

My read of reddit is you need to use 90%-ish of your plan to actually be better of using the plan

Thanks, I missed that on first glance and did manual translation.

Not sure why my iPhone shows an option to translate website but all the destination languages to pick from (I have multiple languages installed), including English, are greyed out. iPhone does support translating from Chinese (Simplified or Traditional), and the button to translate website isn’t greyed out like it is for unsupported/unrecognized languages. Might be an iOS 27 bug, because it is working on other websites?

It's entirely possible, and even standard, to allow the browser to tell your site which language to respond in.

While ignorance of internationalization standards is a possibility, and the most likely cause.. I do wonder if it's a bit of a nudge to promote Chinese influence in the AI space.

Not that they really need to do that, China is already doing great (relatively, depending on criteria). The implosion of the US, the resulting brain drain and world shake-up has been very timely for their AI and other industries.

It's a very smart move for them to think longer term and start freezing out NVIDIA. Then they can take Taiwan purely for ideological concerns and not worry at all about the fabs blowing up in the process.

And they won't be dependent on foreign factories sitting on an island just off the shore of a superpower who's shown nothing below absolute resolve for decades towards the idea of conquering that island....

Why not persist it through a query param? Or a lang param for that matter

It did install, but then would hang when trying to configure the provider (specifically I was trying diffusiongemma via Nvidia). I gave up after a couple of attempts and moved to the next one.

it does have telemetry, enabled by default, that sends metrics to tracking.miui.com, including what model you are using. it can be turned off by environment variable (MIMOCODE_ENABLE_ANALYSIS=false), and yes it still has all the normal OpenCode provider logic so it will work with other/local models. it also automatically looks for updates and fetches a mimo model list, including when the telemetry is off, though those can also be disabled.

telemetry enabled by default and named "analysis" is not great.

I'm slapping debian on any crap hardware around, but that's just me with different ideological standards.

Ok, fair enough compared to the rest of the proeminent actors I guess, but quite confusing from dev point of view. Lately I started to experiment with model like Qwen2.5 on local. Good enough to ask simple question, but didn’t manage to do anything remotely close a agents I started to experiment with through Copilot.

He didn't say that.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/an%20awful%20lot

Who said that?

"damaged" by not paying 99 bucks.

Strange, I reckon I installed Tahoe just a while ago and still didn't have a similar issue, but I remember on previous MacOS versions the error message for unotarized binaries, was to warn that there was indeed a security issue with the binary, not that it was simply "damaged".

A bit crappy on Apple's side.

Thank you.

> promote the free-for-a-limited-time use of their new coding AI service

Not sure which "free" service you're referring to, but MiMo v2.5 Pro is plenty capable & (after its recent 70%+ price drop) one of the most affordable options in its class (DeepSeek v4 Pro, MiniMax M3, & Qwen 3.7 Plus). I read somewhere that Labs are incentivized to implement custom harnesses because each model has its strengths, quirks, & blindspots (like Qwen forking Gemini CLI)?

So, basically the same thing silicon valley has been doing for the past half decade.

"Death of Silicon Valley" in this case is such a funny perspective. Like, how twisted is the US's view of the market that they think "Competition? Oh no. Sound the alarms."

Even worse... they use both terms on the same page in dashboard.

"""

Credits 4,100,000,000 Credits

Total Token Consumption

"""

You can run the two agents in GAN like loop.. each trying to better the other. Give them a common task like design a better alternative to transformer model that uses max O(nlogn) memory, and the result comes closest to existing n^n implementations.

Good idea actually.. why haven't I tried this before.