Something I don't think many have internalized is that China has been as good or better for quite a while now (long before anyone was pointing distillation fingers) and enough people have finally tried it for themselves that the understanding has reached critical mass and the careful narrative of american companies is collapsing.
When I finally put $15 into Deepseek and it beat the brakes off Codex 5.5 on multiple rather complex projects without any of the obnoxious mistakes, I was sick to my stomach with buyers remorse. I couldn't believe I ever felt like I was getting my moneys worth at $200/mo. I wouldn't even use OAI's models if they were free and unlimited at this point, I'll happily pay for what I already know works. No reset bingo, no cache errors, no annoying shitposters as a primary source of info. Oh, and I still had $10 of tokens left
And yes, 3.6 is excellent locally. The rest of this year is gonna be awesome
Opus 5 and 5.6 Sol are definitely not smart enough to do my job. They require constant supervision. So why would I want to switch to even worse model? Even if it's just slightly worse?
>So why would I want to switch to even worse model?
There would be no reason to if you are in the privileged position where cost isn't an issue.
For the rest of us something that's 95% as good for 20% the price is a hell of a value proposition.
And I had the opposite experience. It's a really interesting phenomenon that I can't really explain. My co-founder swears by Deepseek and yet just the other day we were conversing and he was telling me about some of the issues with the way the AI was behaving and trying to show off the cool workarounds he came up with to limit it. I was like, "Interesting, yeah, I've literally never had that problem."
I suspect that the models are genuinely close and that certain experiences get felt across providers but are inconsistent enough to convince people one is superior to the other. I for one have tried Deepseek on and off since my co-founder is fond of it and I've stopped trying now because I never have a good experience.
That’s not surprising. I have been using Deepseek and it consistently produces excellent output given the right context howevwr. It depends on the task as it does have blindspots.
I think americans assume when they see a chinese or asian person working at an american business that they "escaped" china as opposed to just being rich enough to go to school abroad. and has little to no bearing on the amount of intelligent going around.