The Chinese models are only cheap on subsidized Chinese hosting. I have yet to find a USA-hosted Chinese model with a very clear value advantage over US models.

There are basically two tiers of "Chinese models" in this context, the "edge" sized ones with ~30B parameters or less, and the big ~1T models that can basically only run in the datacenter.

I don't think it's as simple as saying China's hosting is subsidized, they have generally cheaper electricity and labor costs than in the US and don't have access to the top tier models, and a large internal market where the big models are the best thing they can run with what they have. So obviously they max out on their top models (which are trained with their hardware market in mind, not ours) and get the economy of scale from that, and can run generally the same hardware for less money than in the US because

The edge models are very cheap to run and can do so on inexpensive hardware. They are like 95% cheaper to run than Haiku, so the math is in their favor for certain batch workloads. Most people just run the models for themselves when they do that without making it available on openrouter or whatever, because you can just provision a gpu node and use it as needed, and it's not that expensive to run this family of models.

Is your problem that you want to call Chinese models hosted in the US because you're worried about the data handling?

No true. Also - put Deepseekv4 Flash on your local with effort set to "high" and you'll see that many many are using that model on their own machines without paying anyone anything.

Its just that some of us didn't imagine having GPUs would be advantageous and were not gamers on the side. Those who had beefy GPUs or GPU rigs for any reason, they rarely need to go anywhere else.

At least I am so impressed with Deepseekv4 AFTER using Claude Opus 4.7 for significant amount of time that I am not going anywhere but Deepseekv4.

The model is just INSANE. Things I have done with it include attempting to write a 2.5D game engine in C with full animation and map rendering layer by layer.

The Chinese models are surprisingly cheap and performant sitting under my desk. Qwen3.6 27B is nowhere near as autonomous as Opus 4.7, but it runs in 24GB of VRAM. And it's actually great for the use cases where I'm going to carefully read and understand all the code anyway.

If you want to support a team of engineers, DeepSeek V4 Flash is antirez's current favorite. And you could support a team of engineers pretty nicely for $40-50k. Which might not make sense if you're on a Claude MAX 5x plan or the old enterprise group plan with fixed price seats. But Anthropic is switching their enterprise contracts over to token-based pricing, at which point $50k is looking pretty good.

Odd take. I'm running them locally at my desk (DGX Spark and 128GB MBP). They work fine for 90% of what most folks do. Admittedly, they do run slower on my hw than on the cloud.

You can find them on Deepinfra. Palo Alto company. Similar cheap price.

Huh? They're several times cheaper than SOTA models at market rate prices.