Absolutely! Chinese models are both cheaper and more capable in many cases, compared to the American models and their makers continuously fumbling or reducing model capability with each update. Deepseek decreased costs when they released Flash 4.1 you would not see any American company do this, in reverse they would try charge you more.
OpenAI decreased prices with the 5.6 model family.
And later they further cut Sol and Terra pricing by 20% (maybe only in the API) and Luna by 80%.
In fact Luna still outperformed DeepSeek Flash 4.1 in cost per task on Artificial Analysis when I last checked.
However, Luna is slightly less intelligent. I have a feeling that it's pretty dumb and prone to hallucination unless running at xhigh or max effort, where it somehow manages to work quite well.
I did not personally test the open weight models beyond the old Qwen 3.6 27B, which produced unusably bad results for me.
The competition is great, and I hope Chinese models will continue to force leading US labs to offer models at a low price point.
That said, I don't think the Chinese labs have anything over OpenAI and Anthropic when it comes to capability or efficiency - I have no reason not to believe the US labs have even lower cost to serve the models.
OpenAI had to cut costs because of Anthropic. I also do not trust the benchmarks when it comes to models anymore. I have tried both Claude and OpenAI models and while it is true that the 5.6 series is smarter than Deepseek (at the time i tested it against 4.0) at that price it is still not worth it and sometimes randomly refuses to do tasks or stops midway etc.
Do also remember China is this far in the AI race despite all chip restrictions from America. If they were in equal standards I truly think Chinese models would have long surpassed American ones. Also would like to remind how Anthropic CEO is being hostile and blaming Chinese models with distilling meanwhile their own models claimed to be Qwen¹ and their stance against open models is negative² and they still keep blaming China for it.
> Also would like to remind how Anthropic CEO is being hostile and blaming Chinese models with distilling
Why wouldn't he? If there really was 25,000 accounts breaking ToS any CEO would at minimum be upset. Evidence of Claude distilling qwen would be damning but that a) makes no sense b) doesn't exist afaik.
So first it’s “Chinese companies cut costs, and you’d never see American companies do that”, and then when it’s pointed out that one of the leading American labs literally just did that, it’s “yeah, but they had to because of competition”.
What do you think is motivating the Chinese labs, benevolence?
> I did not personally test the open weight models beyond the old Qwen 3.6 27B, which produced unusably bad results for me.
So you don't have much perspective on things, it seems. Let me introduce you to the GLM 5.2 and then 5.3/5.3 flash series of... "oh, wow, I should have bought some RTX PRO 6000's while they were 'cheap'" stage of progression.
As someone carrying multiple max subscriptions to both claude and codex - primary workhorse is glm 5.3 flash running on rented GPUs for less than a latte/hr.
I also found qwen 3.6 27B nearly useless for my own needs. DS4 flash 0731 and then 4.1 have been nearly as eye opening as glm 5.3 flash, but have their own warts.
Absolutely! DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 has become my daily driver. It's pretty amazing what it can do for what it costs at deepinfra.com (I don't use deepseek as a provider since they train on your data [at least their honest about it]). GLM-5.1 was my daily driver before that and Kimi K2.5 before that.
My primary use is AI coding agent. Its vastly cheaper than Kimi K3 and I haven't found a scenario where I really need Kimi K3 versus smaller models. GLM-5.3 Flash is good but there is series of bugs in the vllm middleware that prevent GLM models from getting all of their reasoning content returned to them that impairs inference quality. A lot of inference providers use vllm which makes it hard to find a good provider for GLM. I've been using friendli.ai but using GLM-5.3 Flash from them is more expensive then using DS V4 Flash from deepinfra.com simply because deepinfra.com is so cheap. The DS V4 Flash cost at together.ai is similar to the GLM-5.3 Flash from friendli.ai or at least that's what I found in my benchmarks a week ago: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/joshheitzman_i-ran-a-fuller-r...
4.1 consistently surprises me in capability for the price. And I don't think I'm the only one. It's been dominating the leaderboard at OpenRouter, and I just got an email today from Fireworks saying they were _raising_ the price by about 30%. I'll probably switch, because their infra doesn't support being the highest-cost, but it's still telling.
I haven't tried 4.1 flash as I'm assuming its a preview. I did not get good results from the preview version of 4.0 flash (i.e. the one that did not include the month and date of release in its name).
I did try to use Chinese open models, but for my production work they simply couldn't cope at all; both GLM 5.3 and Deepseek v4 went into infinite loop and wasted my tokens until my OpenRouter wallet reached 0; good thing I didn't enable the auto topup. US models, by contrast, breezed past them.
Even for simpler tasks, Chinese models took long time to complete, and I needed to supervise closely. The price , in the end, didn't come cheap, mainly because too much time wasted on thinking.
So maybe one day Chinese models will squeeze out the American ones, but today is not that day.
So no, I am not excited about Chinese models ( just because its open weight and not American).
The analogy makes little sense. The USA was not in front of the USSR and Sputnik merely showed that. It is at this point that the Americans woke up, put a lot of effort and finally were able to surpass the Soviets during the Apollo missions.
China was never ahead of the USA in AI. So perhaps a more proper analogy is the Moon landing. In real history the side that lost the race never got its mojo back...
I was simply saying that when (not if) Chinese AI models will pass Americans, it will probably be game over and Americans will never catch up, let alone become leaders again.
Check the names of the researchers in the DeepSeek's latest paper. Full of Chinese names. Check the list of names in Google's paper. A very similar view. Anecdotal, but quite thought-provoking...
Yep, I'm trending in that direction, and I'm someone with Claude stickers all over my laptop. My main app dev work is still going to Claude, but everything else is going to China even at API rates now.
One simple task: I needed an LLM to go through and clean up a few thousand page descriptions and titles in my personal search engine index, where the human web page authors had put in no effort sigh. I did a shoot out between Claude, Luna, GLM 5.3 Flash and Deepseek. Despite the high cost, Claude's descriptions were terrible, and even Opus warned me that the descriptions coming back from Haiku were "generalized, not accurate". I expected I would choose Luna because of price, and occasionally it did have wonderful descriptions (one captured emotion in a way no other model did). But in the end, the GLM 5.3 Flash descriptions were the easiest to read, they flow well while also being accurate & including necessary keywords, and being highly affordable. So it won out. It's a task that is nowhere near frontier, but a task where somehow China is better than frontier.
API rates still aren’t quite competitive with the OpenAI x20 accounts, but they are definitely getting close with deepseek 4.1 flash. I spent a few days with only 4.1 and was very impressed.
Also, frankly, as a fellow Canadian it's pretty clear that the biggest "rival" the US has right now is itself. Just passed out in the corner puking on itself shouting about all the foreigners who won't talk to it.
I'm from Europe and I hate America way more than China now. Used to be about equal but then Trump started extorting Ukraine, threatening their own allies and sending billions to Israel to help with a genocide. I think that exposed America for what it really is.
China is enabling russia way more than trump, China doesn't care too much about 'morals' either. Chinese companies have been quite important in the construction sector of the WB settlements. Even though I'm not a great fan of Trump I don't see a reason at all to prefer the chinese.
As a New Zealander, I would agree - no reason to prefer the Chinese. But Trump's America is not an attractive option either and there's no reason to prefer it. And given the choice between two ugly options, the rational choice is the cheaper one, surely.
China is a somewhat neutral player, supplying both Russians and Ukrainians. Their attitude and action is way less one-sided than Trump's; especially in the first year of his latest presidency.
With trump his actions being one sided you mean one sided towards ukraine? They still get lots of Intel from Americans and Americans hardly but anything from Russia. But you're right that china supplies both I wouldn't exactly call that neutral as much as just in their self interest.
>China is enabling russia way more than trump, China doesn't care too much about 'morals' either
The difference is China has a good reason to. China doesn't look appealing because they're more moral than anyone else, but what they have going for them is that they still behave like a rational actor. At least their behavior is intelligible in terms of their own interests. The world can deal with a long term selfish superpower but not an unhinged one
I don't think there's a person in China that has as much of a seething hatred for America's 'allies' in Europe as J.D. Vance or half of the American techbro commentariat does
Because at present the pedophile US president is making it his mission to molest my country. China, for all its faults (including espionage, which the US is also guilty of) is mostly focused on conducting trade.
Half of Canada now uses the word 'enemy' when asked for an adjective to describe America or China. We're equivalent in their eyes now because we elected Trump a second time and all that he has said and done in 2.0
It's closer to a cousin you used to be close with despite some moral failings, but who has now has a substance abuse problem and is lashing out at family and friends.
Yes, someone can still blow up a pipe and they look the other way. On the other hand, you can also draw parallels to themselves becoming increasingly reliant on US vs UK in the past.
Absolutely! Chinese models are both cheaper and more capable in many cases, compared to the American models and their makers continuously fumbling or reducing model capability with each update. Deepseek decreased costs when they released Flash 4.1 you would not see any American company do this, in reverse they would try charge you more.
OpenAI decreased prices with the 5.6 model family.
And later they further cut Sol and Terra pricing by 20% (maybe only in the API) and Luna by 80%.
In fact Luna still outperformed DeepSeek Flash 4.1 in cost per task on Artificial Analysis when I last checked.
However, Luna is slightly less intelligent. I have a feeling that it's pretty dumb and prone to hallucination unless running at xhigh or max effort, where it somehow manages to work quite well.
I did not personally test the open weight models beyond the old Qwen 3.6 27B, which produced unusably bad results for me.
The competition is great, and I hope Chinese models will continue to force leading US labs to offer models at a low price point.
That said, I don't think the Chinese labs have anything over OpenAI and Anthropic when it comes to capability or efficiency - I have no reason not to believe the US labs have even lower cost to serve the models.
OpenAI had to cut costs because of Anthropic. I also do not trust the benchmarks when it comes to models anymore. I have tried both Claude and OpenAI models and while it is true that the 5.6 series is smarter than Deepseek (at the time i tested it against 4.0) at that price it is still not worth it and sometimes randomly refuses to do tasks or stops midway etc.
Do also remember China is this far in the AI race despite all chip restrictions from America. If they were in equal standards I truly think Chinese models would have long surpassed American ones. Also would like to remind how Anthropic CEO is being hostile and blaming Chinese models with distilling meanwhile their own models claimed to be Qwen¹ and their stance against open models is negative² and they still keep blaming China for it.
1- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48671252
2-https://www.anthropic.com/news/position-open-weights-models
> Also would like to remind how Anthropic CEO is being hostile and blaming Chinese models with distilling
Why wouldn't he? If there really was 25,000 accounts breaking ToS any CEO would at minimum be upset. Evidence of Claude distilling qwen would be damning but that a) makes no sense b) doesn't exist afaik.
> If there really was 25,000 accounts breaking ToS
Is this even true?
I don't trust a single word that comes out of thr people behind Anthropic/OpenAI.
Not sure about that.
Given the difference in compute, it seems plausible.
However, the researchers at the US labs are surely no less talented, and they have better access to hire talent globally.
They too have to serve their models efficiently at a large scale, and with current capacity constraints this must be a top priority.
So first it’s “Chinese companies cut costs, and you’d never see American companies do that”, and then when it’s pointed out that one of the leading American labs literally just did that, it’s “yeah, but they had to because of competition”.
What do you think is motivating the Chinese labs, benevolence?
> I did not personally test the open weight models beyond the old Qwen 3.6 27B, which produced unusably bad results for me.
So you don't have much perspective on things, it seems. Let me introduce you to the GLM 5.2 and then 5.3/5.3 flash series of... "oh, wow, I should have bought some RTX PRO 6000's while they were 'cheap'" stage of progression.
As someone carrying multiple max subscriptions to both claude and codex - primary workhorse is glm 5.3 flash running on rented GPUs for less than a latte/hr.
I also found qwen 3.6 27B nearly useless for my own needs. DS4 flash 0731 and then 4.1 have been nearly as eye opening as glm 5.3 flash, but have their own warts.
Why use GLM 5.3 Flash when you also have access to Astra, Sol, Fable?
Or I guess the other way around, if GLM 5.3 Flash is so good, why Claude and Codex?
Try DS4.1 Flash. It's another eye-opener. If you run it in Claude Code, it's easy to forget you're not actually talking to a high-end Opus model.
> Deepseek decreased costs when they released Flash 4.1 you would not see any American company do this, in reverse they would try charge you more.
OpenAI reduced prices and Anthropic increased weekly usage limits.
Absolutely! DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 has become my daily driver. It's pretty amazing what it can do for what it costs at deepinfra.com (I don't use deepseek as a provider since they train on your data [at least their honest about it]). GLM-5.1 was my daily driver before that and Kimi K2.5 before that.
Are you finding DS better then kimi k3 and glm-5.3? Do you mind sharing your primary use case?
My primary use is AI coding agent. Its vastly cheaper than Kimi K3 and I haven't found a scenario where I really need Kimi K3 versus smaller models. GLM-5.3 Flash is good but there is series of bugs in the vllm middleware that prevent GLM models from getting all of their reasoning content returned to them that impairs inference quality. A lot of inference providers use vllm which makes it hard to find a good provider for GLM. I've been using friendli.ai but using GLM-5.3 Flash from them is more expensive then using DS V4 Flash from deepinfra.com simply because deepinfra.com is so cheap. The DS V4 Flash cost at together.ai is similar to the GLM-5.3 Flash from friendli.ai or at least that's what I found in my benchmarks a week ago: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/joshheitzman_i-ran-a-fuller-r...
I've used Kimi K3 for a few months as my main model and DeepSeek 4.1 is as fast and about 10x cheaper.
I just had like four big sessions going today, paid about $8 in tokens. I see no reason to pay more, this is more than I need for intelligence.
4.1 consistently surprises me in capability for the price. And I don't think I'm the only one. It's been dominating the leaderboard at OpenRouter, and I just got an email today from Fireworks saying they were _raising_ the price by about 30%. I'll probably switch, because their infra doesn't support being the highest-cost, but it's still telling.
How does it compare to 4.1 flash? Curious why folks don’t use the more “modern” one.
4.1 flash is very fast and capable. Token efficiency is not great so it fill up context window much faster compared to similarly capable models.
glm 5.3 flash is a tad slower but a bit more capable and way more token efficient.
Source: self hosted tested on rented GB200 node at 8bit.
Wow, I'm surprised you are saying GLM 5.3 Flash is more capable. Isn't is like half the price of 4.1 Flash?
I haven't tried 4.1 flash as I'm assuming its a preview. I did not get good results from the preview version of 4.0 flash (i.e. the one that did not include the month and date of release in its name).
4.1 Flash is a horse of a very different color. It cooks. IMHO it's probably a preview of DS5, rather than a true DS4-series model.
I couldn’t tell you what western model I was last excited about. Probably Glimmer.
Jev seems to have people excited, I'm more excited for the Kevs
I did try to use Chinese open models, but for my production work they simply couldn't cope at all; both GLM 5.3 and Deepseek v4 went into infinite loop and wasted my tokens until my OpenRouter wallet reached 0; good thing I didn't enable the auto topup. US models, by contrast, breezed past them. Even for simpler tasks, Chinese models took long time to complete, and I needed to supervise closely. The price , in the end, didn't come cheap, mainly because too much time wasted on thinking.
So maybe one day Chinese models will squeeze out the American ones, but today is not that day.
So no, I am not excited about Chinese models ( just because its open weight and not American).
I have a contrarian opinion that China passing America in Ai is the Sputnik moment we need to leave the hubris behind and get our mojo back
debatable if a turn around is possible before '29
The analogy makes little sense. The USA was not in front of the USSR and Sputnik merely showed that. It is at this point that the Americans woke up, put a lot of effort and finally were able to surpass the Soviets during the Apollo missions.
China was never ahead of the USA in AI. So perhaps a more proper analogy is the Moon landing. In real history the side that lost the race never got its mojo back...
I'm looking forward, towards the future, when I use "passing ... we need", need being key here as it implies something we don't yet have
I expect this to happen within 12-18 months, the differentiation has shrunk, many models are now sufficiently capable for most tasks
I understood that.
I was simply saying that when (not if) Chinese AI models will pass Americans, it will probably be game over and Americans will never catch up, let alone become leaders again.
Check the names of the researchers in the DeepSeek's latest paper. Full of Chinese names. Check the list of names in Google's paper. A very similar view. Anecdotal, but quite thought-provoking...
ah, ok, to add to this, China is persuading nobel laureates to "switch sides" (I imagine the current state of America had a part in pushing him away)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/science/nobel-winning-us-...
Yep, I'm trending in that direction, and I'm someone with Claude stickers all over my laptop. My main app dev work is still going to Claude, but everything else is going to China even at API rates now.
One simple task: I needed an LLM to go through and clean up a few thousand page descriptions and titles in my personal search engine index, where the human web page authors had put in no effort sigh. I did a shoot out between Claude, Luna, GLM 5.3 Flash and Deepseek. Despite the high cost, Claude's descriptions were terrible, and even Opus warned me that the descriptions coming back from Haiku were "generalized, not accurate". I expected I would choose Luna because of price, and occasionally it did have wonderful descriptions (one captured emotion in a way no other model did). But in the end, the GLM 5.3 Flash descriptions were the easiest to read, they flow well while also being accurate & including necessary keywords, and being highly affordable. So it won out. It's a task that is nowhere near frontier, but a task where somehow China is better than frontier.
API rates still aren’t quite competitive with the OpenAI x20 accounts, but they are definitely getting close with deepseek 4.1 flash. I spent a few days with only 4.1 and was very impressed.
I certainly am.
Months ago I switched entirely to use Chinese model. Mostly DeepSeek and MiMo, although I recently started to play with GLM as well.
The models are excellent and in many ways I prefer them to Claude.
I see no difference in terms of capability, but the fact that they are cheap frees me to experiment.
Yes, an expensive American LLM has zero capabilities as far as I’m concerned because I’m never going to pay for it.
No, because I'd rather not support our economic and military rivals.
I'm Canadian so this sentiment has little value in 2026 unfortunately.
As much as the US has been easy to hate lately, I don't hesitate to say Xi Jinping as the most powerful man on Earth would be much, much worse.
He is the most powerful man on earth. He’s just smart enough to let the US get as fucked as possible before making a move.
Also, frankly, as a fellow Canadian it's pretty clear that the biggest "rival" the US has right now is itself. Just passed out in the corner puking on itself shouting about all the foreigners who won't talk to it.
I'm from Europe and I hate America way more than China now. Used to be about equal but then Trump started extorting Ukraine, threatening their own allies and sending billions to Israel to help with a genocide. I think that exposed America for what it really is.
China is enabling russia way more than trump, China doesn't care too much about 'morals' either. Chinese companies have been quite important in the construction sector of the WB settlements. Even though I'm not a great fan of Trump I don't see a reason at all to prefer the chinese.
As a New Zealander, I would agree - no reason to prefer the Chinese. But Trump's America is not an attractive option either and there's no reason to prefer it. And given the choice between two ugly options, the rational choice is the cheaper one, surely.
buy inference from european companies running open chinese (or that one from google) models
China is a somewhat neutral player, supplying both Russians and Ukrainians. Their attitude and action is way less one-sided than Trump's; especially in the first year of his latest presidency.
With trump his actions being one sided you mean one sided towards ukraine? They still get lots of Intel from Americans and Americans hardly but anything from Russia. But you're right that china supplies both I wouldn't exactly call that neutral as much as just in their self interest.
How is China supplying Ukraine?
>China is enabling russia way more than trump, China doesn't care too much about 'morals' either
The difference is China has a good reason to. China doesn't look appealing because they're more moral than anyone else, but what they have going for them is that they still behave like a rational actor. At least their behavior is intelligible in terms of their own interests. The world can deal with a long term selfish superpower but not an unhinged one
I don't think there's a person in China that has as much of a seething hatred for America's 'allies' in Europe as J.D. Vance or half of the American techbro commentariat does
[flagged]
Because at present the pedophile US president is making it his mission to molest my country. China, for all its faults (including espionage, which the US is also guilty of) is mostly focused on conducting trade.
Half of Canada now uses the word 'enemy' when asked for an adjective to describe America or China. We're equivalent in their eyes now because we elected Trump a second time and all that he has said and done in 2.0
It's closer to a cousin you used to be close with despite some moral failings, but who has now has a substance abuse problem and is lashing out at family and friends.
Not an enemy, just a danger.
I'm relaying a poll of Canadians, their word choice, not mine
"plurality" would have been accurate over "half" on my part
https://www.commondreams.org/news/canadians-us-enemy-poll
Canadians warming up to China makes me think of Germany becoming increasingly reliant on Russia in the 2010s.
Murica just has a MAGA problem. We can still be friends if and when you sort that out. Us Canadians like most of you quite a lot.
Yes, someone can still blow up a pipe and they look the other way. On the other hand, you can also draw parallels to themselves becoming increasingly reliant on US vs UK in the past.
Does it count as supporting a rival if your an American using an American inference provider self-hosting an open weight model from a Chinese lab?
Agreed, and also because I support freedom of speech!
Neither the US nor the Chinese companies are on your side then. They both censor, just different topics.
But at least I can run Chinese models locally, and strip a lot of that censorship/refusal.
As long as that speech doesn't come from CNN or criticise Charlie Kirk, Israel or Trump? I'm sceptical about how much the US really values free speech