So you're going to use DeepSeek, Qwen, GLM, Kimi and Mistral now? I tried them, and they really fall short of GPT and Claude.

Without access to US models, I'd be limited to asking simple questions in chat interfaces and maybe some grunt work in coding CLIs, but even that the weak models will mess up.

Nothing has reached Opus and GPT5 levels in my personal experience, which also aligns with what the labs themselves admit ("near-frontier").

Well I am definitely not using the models that I'm not able to access.

So now the question is whether the capabilities of other models are worth their far cheaper token prices.

Plus, are we at all confident Opus or GPT 5.5 aren't about to get shut off?