OpenAI had to cut costs because of Anthropic. I also do not trust the benchmarks when it comes to models anymore. I have tried both Claude and OpenAI models and while it is true that the 5.6 series is smarter than Deepseek (at the time i tested it against 4.0) at that price it is still not worth it and sometimes randomly refuses to do tasks or stops midway etc.

Do also remember China is this far in the AI race despite all chip restrictions from America. If they were in equal standards I truly think Chinese models would have long surpassed American ones. Also would like to remind how Anthropic CEO is being hostile and blaming Chinese models with distilling meanwhile their own models claimed to be Qwen¹ and their stance against open models is negative² and they still keep blaming China for it.

1- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48671252

2-https://www.anthropic.com/news/position-open-weights-models

> I did not personally test the open weight models beyond the old Qwen 3.6 27B, which produced unusably bad results for me.

So you don't have much perspective on things, it seems. Let me introduce you to the GLM 5.2 and then 5.3/5.3 flash series of... "oh, wow, I should have bought some RTX PRO 6000's while they were 'cheap'" stage of progression.

As someone carrying multiple max subscriptions to both claude and codex - primary workhorse is glm 5.3 flash running on rented GPUs for less than a latte/hr.

I also found qwen 3.6 27B nearly useless for my own needs. DS4 flash 0731 and then 4.1 have been nearly as eye opening as glm 5.3 flash, but have their own warts.

Also, frankly, as a fellow Canadian it's pretty clear that the biggest "rival" the US has right now is itself. Just passed out in the corner puking on itself shouting about all the foreigners who won't talk to it.

I'm from Europe and I hate America way more than China now. Used to be about equal but then Trump started extorting Ukraine, threatening their own allies and sending billions to Israel to help with a genocide. I think that exposed America for what it really is.

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Canadians warming up to China makes me think of Germany becoming increasingly reliant on Russia in the 2010s.

As much as the US has been easy to hate lately, I don't hesitate to say Xi Jinping as the most powerful man on Earth would be much, much worse.

Neither the US nor the Chinese companies are on your side then. They both censor, just different topics.

But at least I can run Chinese models locally, and strip a lot of that censorship/refusal.