> Meanwhile the Chinese are going to undercut them every chance they get.

I wish they were, but I always wonder when people chime in with Chinese models what they are actually doing with those. I have an OpenRouter account and give various models a shot every other month, wishing for an alternative, but I always come back to Claude. Even more so since the switch from Opus 5.1 to 5.5. To me, personally, it's unmatched. Like a year ago it was very different, and I would use other models all the time. But honestly at the time they all felt kind of "meh" still. I just hope everyone is at a good baseline in a year from now on, so I actually have a choice. And then, as you stated, things will get interesting.

tl;dr: I agree

> I always wonder when people chime in with Chinese models what they are actually doing with those

In my case: robotics, complex document analysis (typically 800K context).

I use Opus 5.5 daily at work and a mix of GLM 5.3 (Flash or not), Deepseek v4 (flash or pro) at home and while Opus 5.5 is more capable, in my opinion it matters for less than 5% of the work i do. These chinese models are simply good enough for the vast majority of tasks I run and when they're not I use Astra or Opus 5.5. Yes, leaving Opus 5.5 on all the time is comfortable when you pay the 90€ plan but it's just not necessary.

Yeah, I spent the last week with Deepseek Flash 4.1-1017, Kimi 3, and GLM 5.3 (and 5.3-flash). None of them were literally useless but also none of them were capable of making progress on the main project I am working on where Opus, Sol, and even Gemini Flash have all done very good work. Benchmarks might have you believe open models are only barely behind the big US labs in intelligence, but it feels much worse in practice.

I am running GLM 5.3 Flash locally at home for coding and from my point of view it is indistinguishable from the frontier models of 6 months ago. It can handle almost every task I throw at it.

i reduced my claude expenditure in 80% using other models.