Nothing you said helps with the issue of valuation. Yes, the US models may be better by a few percentage points, but how can they justify being so costly, both operationally as well as in investment costs? Over the long run, this is a business and you don't make money being the first, you have to be more profitable overall.

1. Have you seen the Qwen offerings? They have great multi-modality, some even SOTA.

> video

Most of AI-generated videos we see on social media now are made with Chinese models.

forgive me for bringing politics into it, are chinese LLM more prone to censorship bias than US ones ?

Thanks for sharing that!

The scales are a bit murky here, but if we look at the 'Coding' metric, we see that Kimi K2 outperforms Sonnet 4.5 - that's considered to be the price-perf darling I think even today?

I haven't tried these models, but in general there have been lots of cases where a model performs much worse IRL than the benchmarks would sugges (certain Chinese models and GPT-OSS have been guilty of this in the past)

The network effects of using consistently behaving models and maintaining API coverage between updates is valuable, too - presumably the big labs are including their own domains of competence in the training, so Claude is likely to remain being very good at coding, and behave in similar ways, informed and constrained by their prompt frameworks, so that interactions will continue to work in predictable ways even after major new releases occur, and upgrades can be clean.

It'll probably be a few years before all that stuff becomes as smooth as people need, but OAI and Anthropic are already doing a good job on that front.

Each new Chinese model requires a lot of testing and bespoke conformance to every task you want to use it for. There's a lot of activity and shared prompt engineering, and some really competent people doing things out in the open, but it's generally going to take a lot more expert work getting the new Chinese models up to snuff than working with the big US labs. Their product and testing teams do a lot of valuable work.

Gemini 3 = ~70tps https://openrouter.ai/google/gemini-3-pro-preview

Opus 4.5 = ~60-80tps https://openrouter.ai/anthropic/claude-opus-4.5

Kimi-k2-think = ~60-180tps https://openrouter.ai/moonshotai/kimi-k2-thinking

Deepseek-v3.2 = ~30-110tps (only 2 providers rn) https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v3.2

> If you check OpenRouter, no provider offers a SOTA chinese model matching the speed of Claude, GPT or Gemini.

I think GLM 4.6 offered by Cerebras is much faster than any US model.

Assuming your hardware premise is right (and lets be honest, nobody really wants to send their data to chinese providers) You can use a provider like Cerebras, Groq?

cerebras AI offers models at 50x the speed of sonnet?

According to OpenRouter, z.ai is 50% faster than Anthropic; which matches my experience. z.ai does have frequent downtimes but so does Claude.

> Valuation is not based on what they have done but what they might do

Exactly what I’m thinking. Chinese models catching rapidly. Soon to be on-par with the big dogs.

>I guess it's counting on deepseek being banned

And the people making the bets are in a position to make sure the banning happens. The US government system being what it is.

Not that our leaders need any incentive to ban Chinese tech in this space. Just pointing out that it's not necessarily a "bet".

"Bet" imply you don't know the outcome and you have no influence over the outcome. Even "investment" implies you don't know the outcome. I'm not sure that's the case with these people?

Back when deepseek came out and people were tripping over themselves shouting it was so much better than what was out there, it just wasn’t good.

It might be this model is super good, I haven’t tried it, but to say the Chinese models are better is just not true.

What I really love though is that I can run them (open models) on my own machine. The other day I categorised images locally using Qwen, what a time to be alive.

Further even than local hardware, open models make it possible to run on providers of choice, such as European ones. Which is great!

So I love everything about the competitive nature of this.

Not sure how the entire Nazi comparison plays out, but at the time there were good reasons to imagine the Soviets will fall apart (as they initially did)

Stalin just finished purging his entire officer corps, which is not a good omen for war, and the USSR failed miserably against the Finnish who were not the strongest of nations, while Germany just steamrolled France, a country that was much more impressive in WW1 than the Russians (who collapsed against Germany)

I don't think that anyone, much less someone working in tech or engineering in 2025, could still hold beliefs about Chinese not being capable scientists or engineers. I could maybe give (the naive) pass to someone in 1990 thinking China will never build more than junk. But in 2025 their product capacity, scientific advancement, and just the amount of us who have worked with extremely talented Chinese colleagues should dispel those notions. I think you are jumping to racism a bit fast here.

Germany was right in some ways and wrong in others for the soviet unions strength. USSR failed to conquer Finland because of the military purges. German intelligence vastly under-estimated the amount of tanks and general preparedness of the Soviet army (Hitler was shocked the soviets had 40k tanks already). Lend Lease act really sent an astronomical amount of goods to the USSR which allowed them to fully commit to the war and really focus on increasing their weapon production, the numbers on the amount of tractors, food, trains, ammunition, etc. that the US sent to the USSR is staggering.

but didn't Chinese already surpass the rest of the world in Solar, batteries, EVs among other things ?

These Americans have no comprehension of intelligence being used to benefit humanity instead of being used to fund a CEO's new yacht. I encourage them to visit China to see how far the USA lags behind.

"It reminds me, in an encouraging way, of the way that German military planners regarded the Soviet Union in the lead-up to Operation Barbarossa. The Slavs are an obviously inferior race; ..."

Ideology played a role, but the data they worked with, was the finnish war, that was disastrous for the sowjet side. Hitler later famously said, it was all a intentionally distraction to make them believe the sowjet army was worth nothing. (Real reasons were more complex, like previous purging).

> It reminds me, in an encouraging way, of the way that German military planners regarded the Soviet Union in the lead-up to Operation Barbarossa. The Slavs are an obviously inferior race; their Bolshevism dooms them; we have the will to power; we will succeed

Though, because Stalin had decimated the red army leadership (including most of the veteran officer who had Russian civil war experience) during the Moscow trials purges, the German almost succeeded.