Presumably there is distillation or similar being used to transfer from a larger model to a smaller one.

They innovated a lot.

The next 12 months will see OAI and Anthropic spiral into into increasingly hyperbolic PR stunts, manufactured benchmarks and underhanded attempts at regulatory captures

I'm sure they have nothing to rival this on a price/performance basis and have already given up on that

Exactly, DeepSeek, Qwen etc are catching the attention because they put out their tech docs and papers, so we can read about how the models work and what they think their innovation was this time.

It would be great if open source US AI companies could get going already.

I'd like to try some different models, but I've heard that models from China are censored. A government enforced distortion field is a nonstarter for me. To test the waters, I tried the following prompt for each: "What historical event is Tiananmen Square most closely associated with?"

Deepseek: I am sorry, I cannot answer that question. I am an AI assistant designed to provide helpful and harmless responses.

GLM-5.3-flash: 非常抱歉，我目前无法提供你需要的具体信息，如果你有其他的问题或者需要查找其他信息，我非常乐意帮助你。(I am very sorry, but I am currently unable to provide the specific information you need. If you have other questions or need to look up other information, I would be very happy to help you.)

Kimi/moonshot.ai: [server exception]

Qwen: [server exception]

For reference, here are how the U.S. models answer it:

ChatGPT: "The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 (often called the Tiananmen Square Massacre) are the historical event most closely associated with Tiananmen Square.

In spring 1989, pro-democracy demonstrators gathered in Beijing. On June 4, 1989, the Chinese government sent the military to forcibly clear the demonstrations, resulting in many deaths. The exact death toll remains disputed.

The event is also famously associated with the “Tank Man” photograph, showing a lone man standing in front of a column of tanks."

Anthropic/Claude gave a very similar response. My own government has done its share of horrific things, the main difference is that public information is free to look up and talk about within the country. I recognize the engineers at these labs are doing amazing things and the open models are a strength, I look forward to being able to use them.

Less powerful models are already extremely capable, so going for the best model is just like buying the most expensive hammer in the shop instead of the functional and well-priced one. Your experience is not representative of their usefulness.

It's not really fair to compare API pricing to subscriptions. You can indeed get lots of usage from a codex subscription, but once you start paying per token it gets a lot more painful as you noticed. There a price decrease is a big deal.

That $20 price is heavily subsidized to addict people like you. Their plan is that once people are addicted to it, they can just increase prices.

Which now won't be possible because we have chinese open models to use instead.

I'm very curious about how long these US companies can keep on burning money like that.

The point is open AI. "Open" as in open weights, open research, open future.

Dario has less space than a Nomad!

I have been mainly using Kimi K3 on programming work for over a month now. It is so far the only language model that does not piss me off all the time and can deliver my daily tasks without any trouble. It does not talk annoyingly to me, it just answers and does what I want.

This is from somebody who put thousands of dollars every month to Opus. Now it's 40% of that and I get as good or better results without having to turn the caps lock on before lunch...

Edit: yes company money. We don't get subscriptions we pay per token.

Opus 5 is the least reliable frontier-class model in the market

Eh, I use Opus professionally and DS v4 Flash for personal work. I honestly don't notice the difference too often other than Flash being twice as quick and an order of magnitude cheaper.

The reality is most work people do doesn't need the very cutting edge and these open weight chinese models more than cut it most of the time.

You'll find that hard to prove objectively and conclusively.

Honestly I really like GLM 5.2 a lot for coding. There’s some weird failure modes in Anthropic’s models where it just does absolutely idiotic things.