I feel like the frontier labs are going to serve fast/lower intelligence models at a better per token cost than the open chinese models. You're telling me that in the long run, you're going to self-host your own ai infra for cheaper than google can serve it to you? I don't really buy it. I think the dedicated AI data centers are going to serve AI at a lower marginal cost than random businesses self-hosting, and then it's a question of how much of that margin they can capture.

Yes, it may come down to how well they get efficiencies from scale.

People always compare the inflated API prices, but subscription prices of American models are competitive for the intelligence. You get >20x the subscription cost in tokens.

Agree entirely but that's the point, if it's a margin knife-fight with marginal product differentiation/pricing power nobody is going to be making bank.

If they have to recoup training costs then they don't have much choice