Most American companies (regulated ones, definitely) can't dare to touch any Chinese models, though they knew that it makes perfect economic sense. Until the taboo prevails, the cartel get's their flood of profit. That's a cartel protected by regulations.

> and will judge, like any sane person, that US frontier models have stopped earning their multiplier

I think that this is on the money, although I'd place the bar even lower - DeepSeek v4 Flash is sufficient for basically all day-to-day coding tasks.

You might want something beefier for a complicated reverse-engineering project, but it will competently one-shot a decently complicated app or API - and a $10/month OpenCode Go subscription is sufficient to keep you in tokens for such a cost-efficient model...

Similarly, my employer hands us all Cursor, I've yet to actually switch it out of "auto" mode, which mostly runs Composer (their in-house finetune of Kimi 2.5).

I don't get the point. That Anthropic or OpenAI have more expensive products than Alibaba? So does Apple, AWS/GCP, and pretty much any other large western company vs its Chinese counterparts.

Is there any truth to the Chinese models having built in f’ery? Like phoning home or inserting backdoors. Or is that just everyone blanketing “China bad”?

Also what local models are people running and actually finding useful?

There's a lot of assumptions in here and reductivism of the paid plans to just the models. If that's your idea of how you want to use the API sure that's a reasonable mental financial model but if you want automatic integration with third party systems the cost of the "premium" models is not that high relative what was being paid for SAS apps before and during.

How many words did I read in this article before I realized it wasn't written by AI? 10? 20? A paragraph or two?

It's quite strange that it's very easy to detect AI in writing.

What is this $100 plan the author was talking about?

The article is right that open models already compete well with the frontier labs, and that the main thing holding big corps back from switching is fear of China.

I can't see OpenAI or Anthropic undermining their business by releasing top tier open models, but surely Nvidia will do it eventually.

Question that I do not understand:

How should a local-run Chinese Model "phone home" if someone runs it locally on the hardware? I think Im missing some understanding here?

I really enjoyed this critical take on the current landscape. It's a breathe of fresh air from the seemingly neverending stream of sycophants

This is kind of a winding, long-winded way of saying that AI models are going to be commoditized, mostlikely by the Chinese. This has been my position ever since DeepSeek came out. It is a national security interest for China for an American company not to "own" AI. And they will release models to make that not happen.

We aren't yet at the point where running local models can compete with DC type infrastructure but it's not that far away either. 12B models are easy to run on consumer hardware. 31B models aren't that hard either but the tokens/sec are a bit slow. Where will we be in 3 years? 5? I think we'll be running 100B+ models on <$5000 PCs. And at that point is there a law of diminishing returns with even bigger models? We will see.

The issue is that several companies, most notably OpenAI, are predicated on:

1. There will be an AI moat; and

2. That company will "win" or "own" AI.

That's the basis of the OpenAI valuation. If that doesn't happen, it's going to be ahuge problem to recover sufficient revenue to recoup the investment. And I don't think it will happen.

In 3-5 years the NVidia hardware you buy will be several times cheaper and faster than what we have now. That will massively depreciate existing investments because it will ultimately come down to performance-per-Watt but if a theoretical G100 can do 3-4x of the inference of an H100 for the same power, the older hardware just won't be able to compete.

>I am here to light up the dark path you are unknowingly walking, like lamplighters who used to light street lamps for those brave enough to walk the night alone. What the light reveals has a name: Qwen 3.7 Max.

I sure am glad we left idolatry behind.

Is it just me, but the language gap between me and the AI believers is becoming insumountable. I use AI every day. I have a local server not ten feet from me as i type this, but i struggle to comprehend the gibberish that comes from those only slightly deeper in the rabbit hole than myself. Is this what 24/7 AI thinking does to people?

>> I am here to light up the dark path you are unknowingly walking, like lamplighters who used to light street lamps for those brave enough to walk the night alone.

>> It all fell apart quickly, turning into smoke and mirrors. You see, I committed the cardinal sin of idolatry. For that, I am an idiot too. With OpenAI, at least I knew the devil

Is this a critique of the state of AI or Tolkien fanfic?

Every industry goes through its slop phase. You should see how much of early print was smut or really amaturish. We just like to talk about the Bible and the great art. What we need is a way to filter through it. AI should be decent at this, but for many intentional and unintentional reasons it isn't.

They are in the phase I need a government bailout like the banks after their crazy financial adventures of the 2000 to 2008. At which point the corruption is so big, that an Empire crumbles under its own stench?

"Trump to meet AI leaders to discuss US investment in their companies" - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c98r8r7dz5no

"Trump Officials Held Millions of Dollars of SpaceX Ahead of IPO" - https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/trump-offi...