Kimi, GLM, and Minimax are the "Big Three" of open source Chinese AI startups. There's also Qwen and DeepSeek but they are all subsidized by other lines of business.

The Chinese AI models are generally 5-6 months behind high end SOTA western models (and as of the time of this comment it's Opus 4.7 and ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking, it's rumored however that the Mythos and Spud codename models are even better).

To gain market share, the Chinese startup use open source as a distribution strategy and essentially made mid-high end AI a commodity. The best models are still Western but for any application that doesn't require the highest performance in the market or if there's a need for extensive customization or alignment (imagine if you are an oil rich petro state and you don't want your national AI strategy to be tied to liberal international order ideology).

It creates a lot of pricing pressure on the low and mid end, and it's also why Anthropic is desperately trying to go full B2B instead.

However if the third parties hosting the Chinese models at near cost doesn't perform good quality control, it ruins the strategy because customers are not inclined to use chinese models anymore (and first party hosting on chinese infrastructure is out of the question because of geopolitical reasons, so everybody hides behind the polite fiction of using resellers like OpenRouter, Fal.ai, Wavespeed, fireworks AI etc.).