There are also US based companies like Fireworks serving up the best open weight models with the compliances we need in US enterprise. Depending on the company, they may offer more/different jurisdictions, EU probably needs a Fireworks like company (haven't heard about one, maybe it already exists?)
The AI labs have been subsidising. When they try turn a profit, people will move to the fast followers. The only people that won’t are those that compete on leveraging the very latest models and even then, once spend and scale goes to the cheaper providers, we’ll see deeper research from those providers too. Think “PC compatibles beat IBM, Sun, SGI eventually”.
without any hard data one way or another your comment is worthless. "pile up subscriptions" - based on what? neither company is public. "piling up subscriber counts", "piling up API usage"? cool. how much money are they making? oh you don't know because they're not public.
the reality is one way or another that as long as there exists an alternative that a USA company could serve with the same compute rented from hyperscalers, this represents a threat, even if the extent to which is unknown
Why was this flagged? This is absolutely true, Americans seem to not actually want to use Chinese models at least for coding, maybe for other inference use cases but I haven't seen it. No one I know uses anything but OpenAI and Anthropic even if Chinese models are better or cheaper in many use cases.
First 6 of the most used models on openrouter currently are Chinese; that's true for code generation and other coding-relevant tasks too when ranked by share of tokens.
Of course openrouter is not representative because most users directly go to the model provider but it still proves your claim is very far from "absolutely true".
Even if not majority, it doesn't invalidate the point that just because OpenRouter has them as its top models that they are in general use among the population, rather than localized.
Honestly go use Deepseek v4 Flash, the data hosting in PRC is it's only downfall. It truly is an excellent model at the moment. It is opensource thankfully but there is friction there and this won't be as popular.
Why wouldn't the hyperscalers run these open models since they're much better than OpenAI and Anthropic at operating compute at scale?
I think the reason OpenAI and Anthropic stay ahead in revenues right now is because the models are improving too quickly to reliably compete with them on cost.
But, once model performance reaches a plateau -- they have to at some point, though perhaps years away -- that's when ability to operate compute infrastructure at scale becomes the secret sauce.
The big AI labs are likely safe until models stop improving fast enough to protect them from competition on cost.
This similar pattern has repeated in most technical booms prior to this.
When hard drive technology was improving fast enough that old hard drives were quickly obsolete, IBM could maintain good margins making hard drives. But once hard drives got good enough and advances were slow enough that innovation was not the only factor considered by drive purchasers, commodity hard drives started to take over and IBM had to exit those businesses.
The same is likely to happen once model improvement slows.
Kimi K3 is ahead of Fable 5 on several benchmarks.
So basically the angle went from "China cannot ever compete" to "China is six months behind" to "China is six weeks behind" to "China is six days behind but that's because they're distilling" and now you're saying "Yup sure, Kimi K3 is ahead on several benchmarks but you cannot host it yourself so this thing will go absolutely nowhere".
I mean: is it not a bit early to draw conclusions? It's been days since a chinese model is ahead of the very best / frontier US model on several benchmarks and you compare it to models who were clearly behind on everything.
You’re absolutely right and it’s heartening to see. I maintain a client with ~every provider you can think of and llama.cpp and it was really tiring the last few days to see people laundering other stuff through Kimi and Qwen. They’re not even open yet, the hype was based on their own blog posts, no one’s actually running these locally, the Qwen Max’s have never been open, Kimi’s API was 1/2 the speed the benchmarks was based on, when it was up, and had 60% downtime before they had to stop accepting new accounts, and their EULAs are “your inputs and outputs are ours.” May being clear-eyed benefit us both in the long run.
"You’re absolutely right and it’s heartening to see"
Damnit, I usually don't jump to LLM speech patterns, but this opening had me thinking you were a bot. But after checking your profile, I think you pass as human. I wonder when will be the time, this does not work anymore for me. (Creation date is a strong hint, but abandoned accounts can be hijacked)
Hehe, cheers, it really is funny & odd habit I have (usually when I'm in "everyone is wrong!" mode, haven't bothered to argue that, and see someone else arguing it :p)
