I am with you in the spirit of openweights but I am trying to hard-avoid bringing countries into this. The narrative of US vs China only benefits those who want regulatory capture in the US since attacking China is politically much easier than attacking open-weights, so certain groups like to repeatedly call them 'Chinese models'.

> Lots of organizations are continuing to refuse to use chinese models due to security and IP concerns

This is such a common omission: the Chinese models are open, you can host them yourself on your premises. So privacy and independence.

> Lots of organizations are continuing to refuse to use chinese models

Correction: Lots of organizations are refusing to use Anthropic Fable because they have forced opt-in data collection as part of their privacy policy, even for Enterprise.

Nope, but I think this is maybe the critical mass needed to finally crash the AI hype/datacenter cost problem everyones is talking about.

With Oracle being junk before this, more will follow.

If it ends up being open weights, companies will use it running in US data centers.

You can run open weight models anywhere.

Cursor will rebrand it as Composer 3.0 to assuage any such concerns, as they did with the previous Kimi models.

As much as I like GLM 5.2 it's clearly a step below Opus (or even Fable) for more complicated tasks. I would place it at Opus 4.6/4.7 level.

Having said that, the safety system on Fable makes it an extremely unattractive model. It feels that half of the time you're paying double for Opus level performance.

Yes, almost all work people share which seeks to measure the capabilities and differences of models needs to get more precise. We are clamoring to say something meaningful about these things.

But even that isn't the whole story because the models can produce wildly amount of thinking output as well as regular output for a similar query. Sometimes you can take a cheap model and have it think a ton or an expensive model that thinks little and get similar results. But the number of tokens generated will be wildly different.

A better metric is price per byte. Most thinking traces, prompts, skills are in plain English, which is roughly 1 byte per character, assuming UTF-8 encoding (even code should not be much more either). As an aside, it is common to use bits-per-byte as a loss metric instead of the per token calculation, precisely because of the effect of different tokenizers.

It is kind of a shame we ended up comparing token pricing across models and providers when it doesn’t really make sense. Not sure what would be better though.

> Please don’t respond if you are speculating.

I doubt you are going to get a response from an anthropic employee, but I think it is safe to assume they have swapped to a new tokenizer because it improves the performance of their models.

> the reason for the newer apparently less efficient Anthropic token encoding

Less efficient in token usage but per the blogs; it enables the model to perform better.

And DeepSeek V4 Flash + GLM 5.2 is a really good blend of both (fast/cheap DS + more intelligent GLM)

DeepSeek is a whole other story. It and a few others are quite economical. But they're also not nearly at the same level.

I can get by working on code strictly in GLM. I can't with DeepSeek. It makes some pretty careless mistakes and isn't a very deep thinker.

It is very useful as a general purpose model for non-coding purposes though.

Anthropic’s position being that it is entitled to train models on the creative works of anyone at any time, but its own slop generators’ outputs are sacred jewels that must be protected from being learned from.

Read the terms of the ZDR policy with a critical eye. You’ll find that Anthropic retains almost arbitrary rights to retain anything it wants.

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/zero-data-retention

oh, I've no doubt the US government and giga corporations can get zero data retention without ten pages of fine print. the rest of us can't.

with open weight models, you have three other options

A) use a provider that pinky-swears not to store your data. they obviously don't give a fuck about 'distillation attacks', so they have little motivation to voluntarily monitor and store your queries. reasonably high likelihood of privacy.

B) rent the hardware and run the model yourself. very high likelihood of privacy.

C) buy the hardware and run the model yourself. absolute certainty of privacy.

And then I'm of course going to root for getting rid of them.

What alternative would you propose? Currently, there's no alternative I know of, either you rely on the US or on China or both.

Me and many others are doing our best building that alternative and promoting local solutions in all areas, but it takes time. And until then, I'd like to use the one that isn't threatening to steal our territory, thank you very much.

No, just aesthetic trivia that can be paraded around to make them look good.

Given how China behaves it should be evident that the only reason they don't apply military force is because they are not in position to. Not abusing military strength is not exactly being the paragon of virtue when your opposition could probably glass the world thrice before the day is over.

I won't go through everything, but just as an example:

You are not mentioning the greenland situation - why? That's the really big one and the one that made the US much closer to "enemy" than "friend". After all, friends don't threaten to annex your territory.

Regarding propagandists and financing of antidemocratic forces: this refers to a current issue. US is deliberately financing spreading of its ideology in the EU, as they confirmed themselves. [0]

With the genocide, that discussion I'm going to stay clear of, as nobody will be convinced of the other position anyway, too heated. Shouldn't have mentioned it in the first place, as this always leads to flamewars. mb.

Regarding honoring of treaties: let's start with the budapest memorandum - I think that was the first really big one. Then, the 1967 Refugee Protocol which forbids third-country deportations. Then, the UN Framework Convention On Climate Change. Violation of the UN charter, withholding of promised funds. The Convention Against TOrture.

Then all the broken/ignored/overturned trade treaties, all the promises made and not kept - how would anything rely on their word at all anymore?

I could go on for multiple pages. Why do those not count? Why do they have to be "propaganda"?

It is unbelievably difficult being reliant on the US in any way right now. And that's what I'm talking about. Not, which is the "better" country. Reliability and ... well, utility to its partners is the basis of it all. Which right now - compared to china - is rapidly sinking. So where is that ignorance you are speaking of?

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20260716141817/https://www.thegu...

Context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghurs

> Since 2014, the Chinese government has been accused of subjecting Uyghurs in Xinjiang to widespread persecution, including arbitrary arrest and detention, forced sterilization, and forced labor. This is denied by China.

  But thinking China is better?

Everybody is in a bubble. Which is why it's worth looking into other people's bubbles occasionally.

https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2026/07/15/people-in-many...

I measure good and bad by proximity to me. China can directly hurt me the least, the US can hurt me the most.

Again, you might be against Chinese government. People aren’t the world perceive China in a better light than the USA right at this moment.

That is correct, but that’s not what I’m talking about. A lot of people complain about handing their data to Chinese government. My argument is, as of today, people like China more than the US. And the American government has publicly said that they’re basically controlling all AI labs if needed. So yeah.