I tried the preview model 41 days ago and got a pelican with a "change pelican color" button: https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/hy3-preview-pel...
As of today, it has fallen to 8/9th on the rankings. I don't see a reason where you would use this model over competitors. However, price economics are bit confusing, as currently the effective input price of Hy3 via OpenRouter is now the same as DeepSeek-hosted DeepSeek Flash V4.
DS4 Flash can currently run reasonably well on systems with ~96gb+ RAM, I wonder if Hy3 can compete there.
One thing that might not be obvious about about DSV4 is how much innovation the Deepseek team implemented in its architecture. When llama.cpp fully supports its lightning indexer, the full 1M context will only require about 6G of RAM. So even though they are similar in size, I believe Deepseek will be much more efficient in that regard.
> I wonder if Hy3 can compete there
Highly depends on how well Hy3 is resilient to quantization. DSV4 is useful even at 2-bit quants.
Its also only 13B active, so your decode speed would be nearly 2x that of Qwen3.6-27B. So there are other latent benefits as well.
For 'general intelligence', DS4 Flash seems to be a noticeable step up still.
Whereas I can run DSv4 Flash on a pair of DGX Sparks and have enough memory left over for 3M tokens of KV cache, with Hy3 (quantized to FP4), there is only room for ~130K tokens of KV cache.
It's exciting that the open models continue to get better and more efficient across the board!
Edit: fixed, got bad info
I looked into DeepSeek's architecture a little bit and the main focus was how can we save as much money as possible. They did a lot of cost cutting with the attention mechanisms. This allowed them to offer an insanely cheap price even on massive contexts, but seems to have come at the cost of performance?
At least, that's my guess, when I see smaller models costing more and outperforming, I think, "they must have denser attention?"
I would.
Not really at gpt 5.5 tier though, and probably below glm 5.2...
But most of all it just works for me for most things I tried and it's exceedingly cheap so there is no reason not to use it, if you need a foss model.
Edited: gpt-5.4-mini not the base gpt-5.4
GPT5.4 xhigh DeepSWE - 52%
A lot of contaminated benchmarks in the blog post about Hy3, needs real testing though I have a distinct feeling it's benchmaxxed like a lot of Chinese models.