A lot of folks are finding GLM 5.2, Kimi 3, and Deepseek just fine for their use cases.

It does not have to beat US firms, it just needs to be cheaper.

I use Deepseek v4 flash for a lot of reviewing and summarizing tasks, only used 4$ in the last two months. No dramatic drop in performance against other US models, it works for my use case. I do use GPT 5.6 Sol for other things but tried GLM 5.2 and it was good enough.