I have tested Claude (Haiku, Sonnet..) and Gemini Pro as well as chatGPR4o.. , overall quite impressed with Claude and also Command R+ . Youchat's single interface and option to change the LLM in a single conversation works rather well for me, posting link for anyone interested. The student discount is a big plus. Image generation is via Dalle3- and results are impressive.
Can also recommend PerplexityAI though I have to keep refreshing the page and it asks a few follow up questions for more relevant responses. (Can be irritating sometimes, since it involves more steps). But again, Claude3 and GPT4o under the same "roof", also SDXL Imaging and PlaygroundAI for image generation.
The biggest problem with these services is you typically aren’t getting the full/same experience compared to going direct due to differences in the API versions of the models (mainly around the initial prompt) and how the APIs are used.
With you.com for example, the context much is lower and there are undisclosed limits depending on the model.
That said, they serve a different purpose being search engine replacements for the most part. The you.com is also a great deal for students and could be very useful for them with the research mode.
Do I understand correctly that, at the present time, Google Gemini does not provide web or repository links for source code it incorporates into its replies to prompts?
Google Gemini Advanced:
Yes, you understand correctly. Currently, Google Gemini does not provide web or repository links for source code it incorporates into its responses.
However, Google's Duet AI, which uses the Gemini model, does provide source citations when it directly quotes at length from another source, including open-source code.
Gemini is still under development, and its capabilities may change in the future.
Can Americans have accounts with any of the Chinese providers (Baidu, Alibaba, Deepseek) that @havoc mentioned?
A while back I had a long conversation with a guy in China who said he didn't know any English and so was using Baidu for translation. Maybe he was spoofing, but, to me, his English was sophisticated and sounded 100% native. My Chinese friends on Nodeseek have suggested occasionally that translations of English to Chinese via the translator I am using might not be 100%. Do any of the Chinese providers have English interfaces?
@Not_Oles said: Can Americans have accounts with any of the Chinese providers (Baidu, Alibaba, Deepseek) that @havoc mentioned?
As much as I'm for unencumbered progress and the Yi-large-preview appears to be doing well, I've found China is always generally behind (perhaps as they're followers rather than innovators to date - but that's a personal opinion).
@Not_Oles said:
Can Americans have accounts with any of the Chinese providers (Baidu, Alibaba, Deepseek) that @havoc mentioned?
Downloading firmware files from Alibaba is difficult. Some characters are mistranslated, and the captcha is the biggest hurdle. You must manually type it in Chinese. Solving the captcha took me hours. The text is on an image, so copying and pasting is impossible, and OCR may extract incorrect words. Lol.
If you know Chinese then you can create account on them without any issue.
@Not_Oles said:
Can Americans have accounts with any of the Chinese providers (Baidu, Alibaba, Deepseek) that @havoc mentioned?
Downloading firmware files from Alibaba is difficult. Some characters are mistranslated, and the captcha is the biggest hurdle. You must manually type it in Chinese. Solving the captcha took me hours. The text is on an image, so copying and pasting is impossible, and OCR may extract incorrect words. Lol.
If you know Chinese then you can create account on them without any issue.
Yeah this is right - you can technically do it but they really do not care to make it any easy whatsoever for a foreigner to use their services. Qwen/Yi/etc are all free to download from huggingface and they are Chinese-made tho if you want a model that can speak in Mandarin.
Edit: A lot of researchers at my college who do stuff in China have to buy access from telegram channels and stuff because its so hard to set one up lol.
@Dewlance@BruhGamer12 Thanks for your comments! It never ceases to amaze me how vast is the plane of experience here within our relatively small LES community. It's just wonderful! Thanks again!
Looks like they basically kept it free - limits are so high to basically be meaningless (at least for Flash...Pro limits less so). Also liking that you can run it in non-billed mode and lock the API key to an IP so pretty risk free
Bit annoyed that its a custom API though, not the standard openai spec like everyone else. Had to put a bunch of patches into my LLM code to paper over the differences
if url.find("https://generativelanguage.googleapis.com") != -1:
url = url + "?key=" + self.auth_header["Authorization"][7:]
self.auth_header = {}
self.logger.debug(f"Detected API patch necessary: Google")
Hi @havoc! I appreciate your letting me know! Thank you!
FWIW, my previously installed eliben/gemini-cli continues to work well. I don't use it every day, but I do use it every few days. It seems to still work with my previous API key unchanged, and I don't yet know about how current changes from Google might effect costs. It's been free up to now, which is great!
Comments
The biggest problem with these services is you typically aren’t getting the full/same experience compared to going direct due to differences in the API versions of the models (mainly around the initial prompt) and how the APIs are used.
With you.com for example, the context much is lower and there are undisclosed limits depending on the model.
That said, they serve a different purpose being search engine replacements for the most part. The you.com is also a great deal for students and could be very useful for them with the research mode.
Me:
Do I understand correctly that, at the present time, Google Gemini does not provide web or repository links for source code it incorporates into its replies to prompts?
Google Gemini Advanced:
Yes, you understand correctly. Currently, Google Gemini does not provide web or repository links for source code it incorporates into its responses.
However, Google's Duet AI, which uses the Gemini model, does provide source citations when it directly quotes at length from another source, including open-source code.
Gemini is still under development, and its capabilities may change in the future.
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
Huge price war just launched among the Chinese LLM providers. Baidu & Alibaba etc.
Their models aren't quite as good as OpenAI & co but at 50x cost difference vs them they're interesting anyway.
Deepseek seems to be the most accessible/western friendly of the lot that cut prices
Can Americans have accounts with any of the Chinese providers (Baidu, Alibaba, Deepseek) that @havoc mentioned?
A while back I had a long conversation with a guy in China who said he didn't know any English and so was using Baidu for translation. Maybe he was spoofing, but, to me, his English was sophisticated and sounded 100% native. My Chinese friends on Nodeseek have suggested occasionally that translations of English to Chinese via the translator I am using might not be 100%. Do any of the Chinese providers have English interfaces?
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
As much as I'm for unencumbered progress and the Yi-large-preview appears to be doing well, I've found China is always generally behind (perhaps as they're followers rather than innovators to date - but that's a personal opinion).
Downloading firmware files from Alibaba is difficult. Some characters are mistranslated, and the captcha is the biggest hurdle. You must manually type it in Chinese. Solving the captcha took me hours. The text is on an image, so copying and pasting is impossible, and OCR may extract incorrect words. Lol.
If you know Chinese then you can create account on them without any issue.
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Yeah this is right - you can technically do it but they really do not care to make it any easy whatsoever for a foreigner to use their services. Qwen/Yi/etc are all free to download from huggingface and they are Chinese-made tho if you want a model that can speak in Mandarin.
Edit: A lot of researchers at my college who do stuff in China have to buy access from telegram channels and stuff because its so hard to set one up lol.
@Dewlance @BruhGamer12 Thanks for your comments! It never ceases to amaze me how vast is the plane of experience here within our relatively small LES community. It's just wonderful!
Thanks again! 
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
@Not_Oles - Looks like google's new free tier structure is live
https://x.com/OfficialLoganK/status/1825656371708088335
Looks like they basically kept it free - limits are so high to basically be meaningless (at least for Flash...Pro limits less so). Also liking that you can run it in non-billed mode and lock the API key to an IP so pretty risk free
Bit annoyed that its a custom API though, not the standard openai spec like everyone else. Had to put a bunch of patches into my LLM code to paper over the differences
I need free forever!!!!!
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Hi @havoc! I appreciate your letting me know! Thank you!
FWIW, my previously installed eliben/gemini-cli continues to work well. I don't use it every day, but I do use it every few days. It seems to still work with my previous API key unchanged, and I don't yet know about how current changes from Google might effect costs. It's been free up to now, which is great!
I still also hope to try more AI command line interfaces which work with additional models. For example, https://github.com/simonmysun/ell .
Thanks again for letting me know about Google's new free tier structure!
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!