Hy4 is the open-source model that's beating OpenAI for under a dollar

Hy4 is a 3-billion-parameter vision-language model from a tiny team in Switzerland, and it's doing something OpenAI's $400M flagship can't afford to do: it runs on a single consumer GPU and costs pennies per API call. The researchers, led by Simon Willison, published the model and weights on Hugging Face under an open license — no fine print, no vendor lock-in.

The numbers are what make this interesting. Hy4 gets 72.7% on MME-Bench, a standard vision-language benchmark. That's 0.3 points behind GPT-4o, but at roughly 1/40th the price. The model runs on 4-bit quantized weights in about 2.8 GB of VRAM. You can spin it up on an RTX 3080 and it'll process images in real time. For people who already have the hardware, the marginal cost is electricity.

This lands at a moment when the gap between frontier models and what a small team can run locally has collapsed to a few percentage points. A month ago, the open models were 8–10 points behind. Now they're close enough that the differentiator isn't accuracy — it's cost, privacy, and the ability to run the thing yourself. For the familia running a storefront, the cousin's photography side hustle, or any operation that handles images of IDs, receipts, or customer records, the question is no longer whether you can use AI vision. It's whether you want to send those images through someone else's API.

Why this matters for us: the people who control the models are the same ones who can charge you what they want — Hy4 proves we can run the same capability at home, for pennies, without handing over our data.