Chinese are pretty pragmatic. Even if they produce more expensive chips and memory, they are still going to focus on value. But who knows, maybe India will step up again like they did for Y2K 3 decades ago.

I agree. A meeting transcript posted recently from DeepSeek's founder suggests they're going to reach for larger models as soon as they can, and not look back. The model is already bigger than my machine can handle, though (I cannot put up with 25 t/s after getting used to over 100), so I'm not impacted.

We'll make sure there will be enough regulations to have neither the electricity to power it or the companies to build it.

Sorry we a focusing on leather handbags there.

Seems incredibly unlikely, doesn't it? (I hope for the same thing but it feels almost like wishful thinking!)

EU is out of game and can't be back anytime soon.

We'll never have fewer open-weight models than exist now. They won't suddenly disappear when labs stop publishing new ones. In fact, people will keep improving them and will keep distilling new frontier models into existing open-weight models.

Then non-Chinese labs can reopen, or they could offer lower prices right now not waiting for this event.

But imagine if Chinese labs would lose. Then there will be no open models, and the prices for closed models would be raised to the maximum.

My conspiracy theory is that this is the new space race, and the CCP encourages this to show the world what Chinese engineers are capable of, and tank the Anthropic/OpenAI valuation bubble as a desirable side effect.

This will never happen btw.

I'm neither pro China, nor pro US. I'm pro open weights models, and I'm pro cheaper hardware. At this point I don't see any american frontier labs releasing SOTA open weights model, and I don't see ASML/Nvidia/Samsung monopoly getting any competition from anywhere apart from China in the near future.

And what is their nefarious plan after we get "addicted to cheap shit"?

DeepSeek v4 is honestly good enough that I'm fine throwing it at everything in my hobby projects. I guess now I'll be switching from V4 Pro-Preview to V4 Flash. My only real complaint is that they can't do images, which limits their ability to autonomously debug some kinds of issues

Of course you can get more bang for your buck by being more deliberate. But that's equally true with US frontier models. You can optimize your work by choosing between Opus, Fable, Sonnet, Sol, Luna and Terra for each task. Some people seem to prefer to let Opus code and Sol review, for example. And then there is the whole debate whether $current_version is actually better (Some people stay on Claude 4.8 because they dislike how 5.0 is sometimes doing stupid things, just as many opted out of dynamic reasoning when they still could)

I'm not sure to be fair, but they do have constant "token anxiety", which I simply don't have anymore since using v4 flash.

I'm on the Premium business plan and I can easily use up my entire week's allocation in two days of coding. I only use Claude for planning, too, the rest is done by Deepseek and GPT.

Claude is very spendy.