I find the fast models good for rapidly iterating UI changes with voice chat. Like "add some padding above the text box" or "right align the button". But I find the fast models useless for deep coding work. But a fast model has its place. Not $50/month though. Cursor has Compose 1 and Grok Code Fast for free. Not sure what $50/month gets me that those don't. I liked the stealth supernova model a lot too.
GLM 4.6 isn't a "fast" model. It does well in benchmarks vs Sonnet 4.5.
Cerebras makes a giant chip that runs inference at unreal speeds. I suspect they run their cloud service more as an advertising mechanism for their core business: hardware. You can hear the founder describing their journey:
grok-code-fast-1 is free (for a limited time) in opencode zen, has been for a while. (Originally it was billed as a test/to gather training data for xAI.) But right now GLM 4.6 is also temporarily free there (hosted by opencode themselves; they call it "big pickle", and there's no data collection), has been for weeks, and GLM 4.6 is far better (better than Haiku and not very far off Sonnet), and still very fast, so I have no use for gcf1 anymore.
