> but most of them will just pay 10 or 20 times or more for AI than they used to pay until now.

At my work, after the GitHub price hike, we all got the option of 1. Keep using Github, but with the same total spend as before. i.e, use 1/20th as much since the dollar cap isn't changing. Or option 2, use as much self hosted DeepSeek v4 Pro, Qwen 3.6, Gemma4 as you want since it's almost free. (to be fair, we already had the GPUs)

If the Chinese keep releasing open weight models that are "close enough" to the big 3, I expect many orgs to make the same choice. I think we will see VPs and higher start saying "you better have a good reason for using Opus 4.8 or GPT 5.5 Pro, do you have metrics showing ${cheaper_model} isn't good enough?"