hn.today

Revolut moves to self-hosted GLM

twitter.com142 points98 comments
Screenshot of Revolut moves to self-hosted GLM

Revolut has reportedly shifted about 2,000 engineers to a self-hosted GLM model for coding, making Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex options for exceptional cases rather than everyday tools. David Abitbol, who leads the company’s AI operations, is cited as saying the system runs on 56 Nvidia B200 GPUs and costs about 30 cents per million tokens - roughly one-tenth of what Revolut previously paid Anthropic and OpenAI. The account also reports a 70% improvement in engineering lead time, though it gives no details on how that measure was calculated or what comparison period was used.

The central argument is that lower costs can change how teams use AI, not merely reduce their bills. When tokens are expensive, engineers may reserve AI for difficult tasks; at the reported price, Revolut’s engineers could use it more broadly, and that shift is credited with producing gains. The experience is presented as evidence that open-weight models could become the default for routine coding, with frontier models kept for cases where their extra capability matters. Replies raise two practical questions: whether maintaining the GPU fleet and staffing it erodes the savings, and whether GLM produces code as good as leading proprietary models. One commenter argues that experienced engineers may find the difference negligible, while juniors could benefit more from Claude’s greater capability.

Read on twitter.com98 comments on Hacker News

Summary generated by AI from the linked article. hn.today is not affiliated with Hacker News or Y Combinator.

More in AI

The daily digest

Today's best Hacker News stories, summarized and screenshotted, one email a day.