Most American companies (regulated ones, definitely) can't dare to touch any Chinese models, though they knew that it makes perfect economic sense. Until the taboo prevails, the cartel get's their flood of profit. That's a cartel protected by regulations.
> and will judge, like any sane person, that US frontier models have stopped earning their multiplier
I think that this is on the money, although I'd place the bar even lower - DeepSeek v4 Flash is sufficient for basically all day-to-day coding tasks.
You might want something beefier for a complicated reverse-engineering project, but it will competently one-shot a decently complicated app or API - and a $10/month OpenCode Go subscription is sufficient to keep you in tokens for such a cost-efficient model...
Similarly, my employer hands us all Cursor, I've yet to actually switch it out of "auto" mode, which mostly runs Composer (their in-house finetune of Kimi 2.5).
I'll root for DeepSeek v4 Flash as well. It surprised me just how "good enough" it is for most of my needs, and also dirt cheap. Everyone should try it at least once.
+1, it's good enough for what I need to do as a DevOps engineer.
I don't get the point. That Anthropic or OpenAI have more expensive products than Alibaba? So does Apple, AWS/GCP, and pretty much any other large western company vs its Chinese counterparts.
Is there any truth to the Chinese models having built in f’ery? Like phoning home or inserting backdoors. Or is that just everyone blanketing “China bad”?
Also what local models are people running and actually finding useful?
There's a lot of assumptions in here and reductivism of the paid plans to just the models. If that's your idea of how you want to use the API sure that's a reasonable mental financial model but if you want automatic integration with third party systems the cost of the "premium" models is not that high relative what was being paid for SAS apps before and during.
How many words did I read in this article before I realized it wasn't written by AI? 10? 20? A paragraph or two?
It's quite strange that it's very easy to detect AI in writing.
> It's quite strange that it's very easy to detect AI in writing.
Or you detect only the east to detect AI writing?
Something something entropy
If I ask three models to write an intro to the cold war, they'll all try to pick words that sound like they should be related-ish. I'm not saying that's how they work at all, but the output is indistinguishable from just grabbing some words in the wikipedia page.
Humans make mistakes. They'll use words they recently learned. They'll use words that sound good. Entropy still applies, but these outliers are what keeps us from a synthetic piece of writing
"I am also an engineer, which means I have a healthy respect for the practical. All this made me a fine skeptic ..." is what did it for me.
What is this $100 plan the author was talking about?
The article is right that open models already compete well with the frontier labs, and that the main thing holding big corps back from switching is fear of China.
I can't see OpenAI or Anthropic undermining their business by releasing top tier open models, but surely Nvidia will do it eventually.
Nvidia has to balance relations with their biggest customers. So that’s a careful decision to be made by them.
Question that I do not understand:
How should a local-run Chinese Model "phone home" if someone runs it locally on the hardware? I think Im missing some understanding here?
I don't think they do at the moment, but they could be trained subtly add backdoors to code or make "phone home" api calls during dev time, triggering on certain conditions ("is user employee of xyz")
I think the fear is that it might insert some "phone home" routine into the source code that it generates.
Has anyone demonstrated that this type of attack is even possible? Also the moment anyone detects this attack it will nuke deepseek/other chinese AI labs reputation completely, it is the most high risk low reward attack ever.
I really enjoyed this critical take on the current landscape. It's a breathe of fresh air from the seemingly neverending stream of sycophants
you dont like simonw's articles?
This is kind of a winding, long-winded way of saying that AI models are going to be commoditized, mostlikely by the Chinese. This has been my position ever since DeepSeek came out. It is a national security interest for China for an American company not to "own" AI. And they will release models to make that not happen.
We aren't yet at the point where running local models can compete with DC type infrastructure but it's not that far away either. 12B models are easy to run on consumer hardware. 31B models aren't that hard either but the tokens/sec are a bit slow. Where will we be in 3 years? 5? I think we'll be running 100B+ models on <$5000 PCs. And at that point is there a law of diminishing returns with even bigger models? We will see.
The issue is that several companies, most notably OpenAI, are predicated on:
1. There will be an AI moat; and
2. That company will "win" or "own" AI.
That's the basis of the OpenAI valuation. If that doesn't happen, it's going to be ahuge problem to recover sufficient revenue to recoup the investment. And I don't think it will happen.
In 3-5 years the NVidia hardware you buy will be several times cheaper and faster than what we have now. That will massively depreciate existing investments because it will ultimately come down to performance-per-Watt but if a theoretical G100 can do 3-4x of the inference of an H100 for the same power, the older hardware just won't be able to compete.
>I am here to light up the dark path you are unknowingly walking, like lamplighters who used to light street lamps for those brave enough to walk the night alone. What the light reveals has a name: Qwen 3.7 Max.
I sure am glad we left idolatry behind.
Is it just me, but the language gap between me and the AI believers is becoming insumountable. I use AI every day. I have a local server not ten feet from me as i type this, but i struggle to comprehend the gibberish that comes from those only slightly deeper in the rabbit hole than myself. Is this what 24/7 AI thinking does to people?
>> I am here to light up the dark path you are unknowingly walking, like lamplighters who used to light street lamps for those brave enough to walk the night alone.
>> It all fell apart quickly, turning into smoke and mirrors. You see, I committed the cardinal sin of idolatry. For that, I am an idiot too. With OpenAI, at least I knew the devil
Is this a critique of the state of AI or Tolkien fanfic?
I don't think the writing style has anything to do with AI, it's just a writer without an editor.
> Is this a critique of the state of AI or Tolkien fanfic?
Por que no los dos? One of the most storied AI researchers is most known for his Harry Potter fanfic, and we all know how much the techbros love naming things after Tolkien...
Who is that?
Yudkowsky
It is not just you
The last notable event in American history when the meaning of words lost any semblance to reality was just before the Civil War. We are living in a post words world where words have no meaning.
Every industry goes through its slop phase. You should see how much of early print was smut or really amaturish. We just like to talk about the Bible and the great art. What we need is a way to filter through it. AI should be decent at this, but for many intentional and unintentional reasons it isn't.
> You should see how much of early print was smut
Hey, don't malign smut. It's the great technological motivator
Early print was not just smut or amateurish. Some of it was highly harmful misinformation: Malleus Maleficarem is an outstanding example that caused an immense amount of harm.
They are in the phase I need a government bailout like the banks after their crazy financial adventures of the 2000 to 2008. At which point the corruption is so big, that an Empire crumbles under its own stench?
"Trump to meet AI leaders to discuss US investment in their companies" - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c98r8r7dz5no
"Trump Officials Held Millions of Dollars of SpaceX Ahead of IPO" - https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/trump-offi...
No they aren't, the links you provide don't support what you say, and your latter comment is nonsensical babble.
Except you provided no argument. Explain why the AI gang, like a rich kid who run a high debt at the Casino, during their drunken weekend in Vegas...is frenetically calling on daddy US to bail them out:
"US officials eye government stakes in AI companies" - https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/us-officials-eye...
"Trump to meet AI leaders to discuss US investment in their companies" - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c98r8r7dz5no
They are facing a Capex of 2 to 3 trillion until 20230, and have now realized they are out of money.
The retirement investor bailout strategy seems to have recently failed with the index fund rejection of SpaceX but therefore Anthropic and OpenAI. They’ll have to keep looking for ways to make others deal with the consequences of their actions.
Only for the S&P not the NASDAQ, but the Capex they need until 2030 is well over 2 to 3 trillion, so now they plan to use US Treasury Bonds as their exit liquidity.
"Your 401K Is Their Exit Strategy" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48433705
Is "taboo" the right word? "taboo" = "banned on grounds of morality or taste". Not sending data to known IP thieves, state actors, and competitors in China (or Russia or Israel) seems very rational.
Many of the Chinese models are open weights, so if you are concerned about them "phoning home", then anyone can just self-host and run them themself, or use via a US provider such as OpenRouter.
There's a higher-order concern here that I'm paranoid enough to voice: that if used as a coding agent, an AI model affiliated with a country's government might try to make my software susceptible to attacks by that government's intelligence forces.
And note that I'm not singling out China here.
Since that is valid for every model from any country, it's a good idea to review the code the agent creates :)
I don't think it's a stretch that you can train/align a model to avoid "hatespeech" or other topics deemed $Unacceptable you can align a model to favor a certain ideological viewpoint and have that alignment subtly influence the output.
How do most Chinese models handle Tienanmen square or discussions on Han superiority?
Or I can just use the domestic model, accepting that I'm paying some premium in order to reduce the complexity of my dependencies and the amount of time I have to spend thinking about supply chain risk. It's the same reason I don't buy things from Alibaba even though many things I buy from Amazon are surely available there for less.
Giving up our agency to AI has the potential to turn us into NPCs, period. Economically, politically, socially. They've invented a vehicle for inserting any idea they want into our consumption and output.
>> Not sending data to known IP thieves, state actors, and competitors in China (or Russia or Israel) seems very rational.
As opposed to sending data to known IP thieves, state actors, and competitors in the USA ? Which one is the most irrational?
You can legally act against one, not against the other.
Not exactly a hard question.
No one is forcing you to use either.
Nothing will happen to anyone.
Biden preemptively pardoned his cronies, and so will Trump.
Given how little voting power these "shares" have (they are effectively SpaceX trading cards/NFTs) perhaps they were simply printed on SpaceX letterhead? If Musk says a person has "shares" who at spacex is in a position to disagree?
Ah yes. The illusion of freedom.
We as Americans at least have some amount of influence over American corporations, and enforcement mechanisms for those breaking the rules.
Well sure they do, thank Citizens United and others for that. But that doesn't mean we can't appropriately categorize them as also hostile actors alongside russia, china, whoever.
It's undo influence over politics against the best interest of the American people that's the issue. Company, foreign nation, it doesn't matter.
I suspect the recent space X S&P decision had something to do with public perception.
I'm not any less concerned about the US companies.
A Chinese company seems more likely to produce Chinese products that don't directly compete in the US market.
While a US company can ship the product as a feature of their platform and undercut on price while making up the revenue elsewhere
Edit: I personally use US models, but I'm not naive enough to think that's any sort of real protection of IP
The Chinese models can and should be run locally (though the price difference vs western models isn't as good when done this way).
Before the age of AI Agent Harnesses/unbounded tool calling, there was literally ZERO risk of a .safetensors file "hacking" you. You could even air-gap and run a ton of security analysis/HIDS on your server running the model to verify this.
Now, because a microscopic risk of some chinese AI having a "trigger" to act badly in a harness when it detects its being used by some Gweilo in the USA, even locally run Chinese models are DOA for most USA based companies.
I don't want to send my data to known IP thieves, state actors, and competitors in USA either. This to me seems very rational.
It's not tribalistic or binary ,choose USA Or Choose China. We can choose neither.
Choose neither abuse.
They've been singing the same old song since the Cold War, "either support everything the US does or you're a commie/terrorist." Yawn.
These are the same people that sent manufacturing jobs away to be copied elsewhere. They got rewarded for it in the market. Decades later, when it was clearly a problem, they got tax breaks to bring some of it back/distribute the work to other, friendlier countries.
Every public AI that is not full of classified material will end up being hosted where the energy cost*compute efficiency product is lowest, thievery or not.
With Chinese GPUs just a step behind (but subsidized), China putting in 8x more solar than we do in 1 year, and Chinese models just a step behind but free? All public AI will be hosted there, theft or not.
If it becomes a problem, then we’ll subsidize the rich to bring it on-shore, but only to those companies who our leaders invest in already - to maximize grift and corruption.
"China bad!" is a moral statement. Whetever the reasons might have been that it was formed.
China is bad and there's a moral argument there. But the reason you want to be careful with sending IP to China is quite pragmatic: they're willing and able to use it while competing with you.
Is Alibaba interested in copying your TUI RSS reader though? Probably not.
And US companies aren’t going to compete against you?
Why not Chinese models hosted on American hardware?
The reality is that they're a hell of a lot less cheap on American hardware than on Chinese hardware. At the point you are running Chinese models on US hardware, "Why not nano or haiku" becomes the next relevant question.
Not true. Togetherai, deepinfra, fireworks AI offer a wide range of models like gpt oss that are very capable and far cheaper than the models from big 3.
Are they better? Are they better than GPT5.5?
I think unless one is operating in a highly regulated industry, wanting to avoid "sending data to China" is a bit paranoid. For code specifically, most of it is not interesting anyways.
You have the models available on Bedrock. What is the problem? It stays within your AWS account.
And the reasons are same. Chinese cars can't be sold in US (EU is planning a similar law to ban Chinese goods).
>Most American companies (regulated ones, definitely) can't dare to touch any Chinese models, though they knew that it makes perfect economic sense.
Weird, considering they had no issues shipping manufacturing and supply chains to China when that made economic sense.
Yes, there was a whole idea about civilizing and pacifying the world through economic cooperation that would foster middle class in countries across the world that would then in turn make them democratize and become peaceful trade partners.
It didn't quite work out so now people are looking for other strategies.
> It didn't quite work out so now people are looking for other strategies.
World will bifurcate into West and East with their own spheres of influence. As JD Vance said, US thought that China will be perpetually kept busy and enslaved in low level manufacturing work and the design and higher level work would happen in Cupertino. Too bad, that didn't pan out well and now US Empire is getting challenged by China.
> US thought that China will be perpetually kept busy and enslaved in low level manufacturing work
It's OK, they'll make the same mistake with India now.
The government may have allowed it with that intention, but the corporate leaders followed through mainly with the intention of short-term share price increases. I don't see how the same incentive isn't in place today with respect to data. Perhaps only the perception of China's ability to outcompete its American customers has changed.
The idea does smell a bit like a rationalization for policy that was extremely convenient for stockholders and a disaster for workers.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/i1Hi_hacvN4
And if that fails, the US can always use economic and military pressure to get what it wants.
>then in turn make them democratize
Most non western countries lack the foundations of western democracy, and you can't force that onto them neither peacefully not through war. The west has tried and failed for 40+ years to do this, it doesn't work, time to drop it and let them self govern the way they always have. Stop trying to export our version of democracy onto others.
Plus, the main reason they exported manufacturing to China was precisely so capitalists could avoid the issues democracy gave them back home and easily exploit Chinese labor and environment for profit because just bribing the CCP meant all your problems go away, no unions, no employee rights, no environmentalism etc. like in democratic countries. So given that, why would the west want China or other countries they want to exploit, to be more democratic? Unless their version of democratic just means a puppet government under western(US) control.
>become peaceful trade partners.
Which countries did China bomb VS how many the US bombed? My energy prices (and directly inflation) is now higher because of (yet again) US military intervention, not because of China.