GPT 4.5 level for 1% of the price

It doesn't really matter what nationality or ethnicity you are, but if you communicate with the model in Chinese you might get better results from this model.

Then again, if they've misrepresented the strength of the model overall, there might be some other shenanigans with their results. The fact that their results show their model is worse than GPT-4.5 on 2 Chinese language benchmarks, while it's so much stronger on some of the others, is a bit weird.

Do the benchmarks reflect real-world usability? My feeling is that the benchmark result numbers stop working above 75%.

In a real problem you may need to get 100 things right in a chain which means a 99% chance of getting each single one correct results in only 37% change of getting the correct end result. But creating a diverse test that can correctly identify 99% correct results in complex domains sounds very hard since the answers are often nuanced in details where correctness is hard to define and determine. From working in complex domains as a human, it often is not very clear if something is right or wrong or in a somewhat undefined and underexplored grey area. Yet we have to operate in those areas and then over many iterations converge on a result that works.

Not sure how such complex domains should be benchmarked and how we objectively would compare the results.

Based on what Altman says and leaked reports, OpenAI is actually losing money on every new user. Unlike traditional software, maintaining a SOTA AI service doesn't scale. The conundrum he faces is he can either quantize models and slash R&D to try to turn a profit now but lose the SOTA race, or keep pumping money and hope the rest bleed out. He's opted for the second, having raised 10B in 2023, 6.6B in 2024 and reports of another raise in 2025. He's probably trying desperately for the middle ground where an explosion of high price subscriptions replacing workers massively boost his revenue. So he's also reportedly projecting revenue 4x to 13B this year.

A lot of consumer tech with very competitive UX is coming out of China. They are also getting very strongly into e.g. web frontend tech. I see no reason why the west would have any special advantage in this.

Chinese hardware docs are very scarce if you don't know mandarin and don't have Chinese connections.

So to compete on software West might encounter unexpected difficulties. You need good platform docs to develop good software.

Probably not a problem for big companies.

What user experience are you talking about? Chatbot? Or software in general? Cause Tiktok beats Facebook out of water. Chatbot for English communities sure, I also prefer Claude over Deepseek in terms of project support and UI. But this is because they are focusing on Chinese communities, Doubao has much better features that is used by Chinese. It's not really comparable even if all US chatbots were accessible in China. Once LLM tech slows, I am sure Chinese chatbots would beat the American ones in terms of user experience.

So far. China has been focused on becoming a world's factory for 30 years. They started moving up the food chain fairly recently.

Give it another generation and if China will not walk off the ledge with either government or societal issues (which, granted, is where they are slowly going IMO) they will own the UX and design as well. My 2c.

Software is more trivial than hardware. That’s why you see bootcamps for software but not for hardware. China can easily eclipse the US on the software front. And they have.

Correct answer, never think about the future in terms of linear extrapolations. It's a non-linear differential equation with lots of variables and expect complex feedback loops. Systems react to change.

Jevons paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

you are assuming that cost is stopping from ppl using these technologies.

These things are not actually useful. They hyper optimzed it for coding usecase but it still sucks balls at it.

It will be (arguably already is) societally rough though. The west has been riding the asian cheap labor for decades (and the cheap colonial labor before that). People are not gonna be happy falling down the "value chain".

China is building an entirely independent semi conductor supply chain and if they are not competitive now, they will be in the near future. US sanctions forced them into turbo charging their efforts.

I have two SO-DIMM sticks of a domestically produced Chinese brand named FASPEED, with chips bearing logos and markings that I don't recognize from anywhere else. These sticks' mfg. datestamp is "44-24" and from what I've learned they cost little in China but come with a salted price tag when sold through channels aimed at Western customers. I'm not sure if they come in fast-enough variants to compete, and not sure about the quality or longevity otherwise. FASPEED makes SSDs, too, but I have no data on those. I also have an M.2 SSD from another Chinese brand called XINCUU which I previously had never heard about. The label of that SSD is in parity with expectations of Chinese business morals - it claims to be PCIe NVMe with "1000 MB/s speed" but is in reality a SATA device, and it does not perform even close to the ~550 MB/s limit of SATA 3.0. Both of these run unusually warm for DDR4 memory and M.2 flash storage, leading me to believe they are wholly designed and produced in China.

This is also true of OpenAI and Anthropic. There is a disturbing level of censorship there.

at the moment it's definitely price though

That vast majority of conversations with AI is irrelevant to censorship. Well, I can only speak for myself, but surely you can see questions like "phone A vs phone B", and "how do I use feature X on product Y" or almost any programming question isn't concerned with censorship.

Is censorship a thing for models? Of course. Does it matter? Probably not, unless you either specifically have chats on those specific topics, or if you are trying to create a meme.

The concern of censorship is way overblown by some people. Most users only care about "does it work?", then some "is the answer correct?", and at the bottom is "is the answer censored, and according to what ideology?". Seriously, think about these models/products like a normal person.

A copyright exemption would just put them at the level of deepseek officially, but they've been working around that anyway in practice. I'm not sure that change would make any difference.

That one weird trick. x4.

This is all protectionistic measures. Just let it implode, and let companies with better technology take over.

Why should people involved in some hyped company deserve all this "socialism for the rich" from the state?

This is the old way of doing it, and probably the way the US is going to go with, at the detriment of its own population. - I would posit that since we are talking about digital goods, there is a better way:

Require open source / open weights of any company that used data to it doesn't own to train its models. If chinese companies do not comply, their copyright becomes void in the US, and these models are very easy to copy. Treat advances in architecture as a utility, and let the utilization of those architectures be the market for companies to compete in.

Of course, none of this will prevent china from producing technology that's clearly as impressive, if not more so.

Chinese complete supply chain is ramping up. Previously they could achieve the Frontier but hampered by tools sanctions. Now Chinese indigenous tools are catching up.

Producing up to certain standard of quality of DDR5, LPDDR5 and NAND with decent yield.

They effectively are banned for a lot of the commercial world already. I cannot imagine most businesses American or European would be willing to use Chinese services.

It is entirely irrelevant who pioneered the tech. This is why no one gives a crap about xerox anymore.

Dismissing Chinese tech is foolish. They are tech leaders in many areas and moving to new ones every day. Solar, Nuclear, Batteries, EVs, Drones, Robotics etc. They have no one to copy in those fields because they have left the rest of the world behind.

All developing markets "steal" until they've caught up with the competition. Just look at the US and how they "stole" innovations and tech from Europe.

>When it comes to hardware who pioneered all those technologies?

Not sure that matters anymore in the new world order.

Frontier tokens are largely fungible now. The details of how they came about doesn't make them any less useful.

Possible, but if you look at the graduate students and lecturers behind many of these IPs you will find they are Chinese (or Russians or Iranians).

This is the paradox in those who are championing barring Chinese students from the US to prevent them from stealing IP, they don't see that at least 50% of this IP is generated by students from China, in a way they will be handing the CCP a gift by incentivising those students to remain in China.

Would you say the west “stole” the IP for paper , ice cream, tea and noodle? Weird notion.

By the 1890s both the US and Germany had surpassed Britain when it came to industrial output, I don’t think it was any consolation for the Brits that they had invented it (almost) all.

These sour grapes comments are so goofy, and honestly a little racist. The millions of Chinese engineers working out in China are extremely talented, and to downplay their achievements like this and to chalk them all up as thieves is ridiculous. They have the skills, the man power, and the vision, and they’re eating the West’s lunch regardless of your feelings on how fair it is.

>They’ve stolen unimaginable amounts of IP and will continue to do so.

All AI models are built on the back of massive amounts of "IP stealing". Either we consider IP to be valid and then all western companies in this space are just as bad, or we go with the direction the western companies are claiming and then China is not doing anything wrong.

I’m replying to myself to address multiple other replies.

First of all, it’s really sad to see people saying it doesn’t matter the journey of how one achieves success, and all that matters is your current state.

Brushing the CCPs countless acts of IP theft under the rug is like saying it doesn’t matter that the Trump family committed financial fraud for decades. All that matters is that they’ve managed to become billionaires today. Would the Trump family be anywhere near as wealthy if they hadn’t cheated for so long? Would China be much further behind than they are now if the CCP hadn’t stolen so much IP? I see multiple people here implying those questions are irrelevant, which I absolutely disagree with. Ignoring all that history is a huge injustice to everyone else who didn’t resort to that kind of behavior.

I also want to be clear I’m not trying to make some ridiculous claim that Chinese individuals have been working independently to hack and steal IP. It’s their government and that same government is to blame for the many people like me who really look down on them despite what they’ve ultimately been able to achieve. They undoubtedly have huge numbers of brilliant citizens. When I make comments about China’s shameful history of tech IP theft, I’m talking about their government.

> stolen unimaginable amounts of IP

something something software patents

The current western lifestyle of dirt cheap foreign goods exists only in a world of relative poverty and underdevelopment.

My man literally the best open source model (that happens to be excellently documented) is Chinese.

There is already evidence that they do in fact contribute to open source. Maybe replace “hope” with “continue to”

can I say something.

This is one of the most finest and most accurate things that I have read in a long time.

This really could be a blog post which I encourage you to make! (I would prefer github pages but if you really want , I have a domain name on cloudflare and I am more than willing to host the static page of such blog on my own domain name for absolutely free (lets go , cloudflare!)

Its just facts. Pure facts. "" Generally, I’ve found that almost no founders or friends I speak with have any vision for the future anymore. They care only about making money and do not care how. It’s a spectacular collapse of vision and purpose—these people have always existed but it feels incredibly pervasive now. ""

Why did I read it in a monotonous way as if a student from the future understands the current scenario. I felt as if it was the same level of sadness in my heart as that when you listen to some video which has raining background and he reads the dark comedy (something like burialgoods oats shitposting but this time more serious and real!)

Currently saving this on wayback machine just for this comment. Internet needs to preserve this comment , no matter what.

> I’ve found that almost no founders or friends I speak with have any vision for the future anymore.

I think in general there is a feeling that the time to get your bag is rapidly shrinking.

Once everything is built by these things there will be no reason to create anything as the platform owners (big tech) will be able to take everything for themselves and no longer have to share 70% with those pesky creators/small business/startups etc.

Founder risk has been nil for a long time either because they pay themselves six figures out the gate or because the job market has been hot enough that they can market utter failure to get another job.

There’s a lot of opportunity to make low cost software that out competes big tech just because it doesn’t demand 10000x returns on every if statement.

I’d encourage Europeans to start replacing American software vendors with small teams today. You won’t become the next American oligarch but you’ll be able to clean up millions from the incompetent Americans.

> VC has been investing in AI as-if it were a winner takes all market, but it has been obvious that isn’t the case.

I really don't see how this was supposed to go, and I've never heard an explanation.

I don't see any kind of coherent vision from any of these types.

Most normal folks (i.e not SV/HN types that seem to desire to replace their marketable programming skills with LLM output) really don't "want" LLMs in any real sense.

Sure, people use them like a search engine, kids cheat on homework with them etc, but there's not this overwhelming universal desire for them like there was for, say iPhones.

I never once have heard any sort of proposed roadmap for how LLMs were supposed to work as a product.

They were just going to get, uh "really good" and take everyone's office job or something?*

Normal F500 organizations that are obviously a target for LLM use (via hyperscaler sales) are still yet to see a clear path to "revolutionizing" their workforce or whatever via LLMs-it's just not there. Costs are too high, there's no obvious use case, "hallucinations" are a real impediment etc.

I'll add many of the public usecases for this (i.e those a hyperscaler would blog about as a sales promo) are seriously weak ("we reduced onboarding time by 20% with $MODEL")

I would really like to hear a proposal for how this is all supposed to come together. Does anyone have a concrete plan for the future for all this stuff?

*I'll note, this is NOT the way to sell a product to the masses, either.

Addendum: I'm not an "LLM hater" by any means. I pay for GH Copilot, and have been running local LLMs since it's been a thing (granted with limited hardware, and limited quality)--I intend to wait a bit and buy better hardware with one motivating factor being running local LLMs in a year or so when the open-source offerings stabilize"

There used to be significant alignment between engineers, founders and certain VCs: lots of excitement around building software that genuinely made things better/easier/cheaper. Each group naturally wanted a different thing out of this arrangement but each camp was on the same page.

Now I feel like everything is more top-down. The tech sector feels less like market capitalism and more like something being centrally planned: we all must chase trends that come from various industry thought-leaders. And it all must be done a very specific way (this in particular is why Chinese companies are likely going to disrupt the AI market: they’re free from this burden)

VCs are happy to throw money at something if they believe they can corner a market. It just doesn't have to do much with reality. Until of course, it becomes self fulfilling. But in this case it seems like it's not going to happen because nobody has a moat.

Its a collapse from fictional reality to real reality , but a collapse nonetheless.

Sometimes reality acts more weird than fiction itself. I have just now decided to call this "fictional reality"

Like yesterday when I realized that nuclear bombs weren't that far away from the creation of chemical resonance & they happened after world war I and I think , just really 5-6 years before nuclear bombs but still!

It actually gave me a lot of hope because I felt that a lot of people were focusing on AI , so I can use AI (sometimes , if I want) to focus on a passion project that I want , to maybe earn some money.

I have also thought of creating AI projects but that too for fun. I don't know two shits but I just want to know what the hype is about from a theoretical standpoint.

> I think you're witnessing it rather getting back in touch with reality than collapsing.

You're witnessing the USA tech scene getting in back to reality. Software engineers in other western countries looked at the salaries the Tech scene was paying in the USA, and scratched their heads.

It's not about patriotism. Many people outside the US, myself included, see a problem with authoritarian superpowers per se. Although now that the US is rapidly drifting towards authoritarianism, that just seems like an inevitable future to prepare for.

It has nothing to do with just giving up and going 'Wellp, I guess China wins.'

China and the US are obviously very different culturally in just about every way possible. This difference makes for great competition. Someone in another topic mentioned something that seemed pretty insightful to me - in that where LLM companies failed in the US was in basically becoming clones of each other, whereas DeepSeek (and now perhaps Baidu) were going in a different way, and that way turned out to be better.

US companies will inevitably copy these strategies, one way or the other, as will Chinese companies copy what ends up working well from the US (see their latest rockets looking more than a little inspired by Starship). And the true competitiveness ensures in the end that the main people who will win will not be whichever guy ended up founding an AI company first, but you and I. It's how capitalism is supposed to work - companies beat themselves down into a race to the bottom, and society reaps the rewards. It only gets really messed up when there's no "real" competition, which is an increasingly frequent state of affairs. But that definitely will not be the case here.

Expect the same thing from India in the future as well. Their economy is advancing rapidly, and soon enough we're going to have another 1.4 billion people able to fully utilize the outliers such a population entails to similarly drive things forward in their own unique way. It's a great future for the world as a whole.

I think (hope) most folks care less about the “attack on patriotic identity” and are more concerned that what is essentially a dictatorship is rising in power significantly. History has shown dictatorships rarely end well for the general populace and the rest of the world.

Democracy has its flaws, but one of the features that most people prefer is that it can significantly change how it looks and operates to reflect the will of its people without violence.

As a European I can say that I like this development because prices go down and models get better and OpenAI has no monopol anymore.

don't know why you're getting down voted because it's true. we should work together with the new world superpower instead of fight it.

and don't start on some dictator BS. the US does/has done as many, if not more, bad things as china.

Given the framing of "most people" and "patriotic": China's got 1bn+ people.

Like 95% of the planet, I'm not American. Like 82% of the planet, I'm not Chinese.

BYD being better than Tesla isn't a matter of patriotism in most of the world. DeepSeek and Baidu can spend as long as they want playing musical chairs/rap battles with Anthropic and OpenAI, it makes no odds to me which wins.

America and China both have politics that have no reason to care for people like me, nor people like my friends, that they are for different reasons and differ in penalties for being an out-group doesn't matter when I'm a foreigner to both, when my antecedent are who the 13 Colonies rebelled against and more recent antecedent forced unwanted opium sales on China.

"Free" does not mean "available to everyone."

Surely, this is as inevitable as not being able to use Wechat as an American.

The models aren't what worry me anyway. China is going to kick our ass when it comes to AI integration into society and the economy.

Imagine the difficulties faced by America vs China in integrating AI into healthcare.

We are just too worried about winning this AI model sporting event even though the entire concept is flawed and doomed to failure. We actually have to figure out how to use these models for more than how many Rs are in strawberry. That appears to be the actual hard part.

Of course, none of this is helped by having wasted an entire generation of some of America's best minds on javascript programming for obscene profit.

Good point. But pushing it as a product with that knowledge still puts it in a weird spot for me.

Vision related tasks like Waymo self driving cars and then also productivity enhancement like coding assistance and writing.

>AI company to other companies: For $20k, we can replace your workers

>Open access LLMs to companies: That's nice, for $2k, we can destroy your business model

That's not the argument they were making. What they're stating is that the Trump administration is directly facilitating the slow death of American intellectualism, and that this will have downstream consequences for what advances come out of the US in the future.

Trump can pretty much reduce Sam Altman's talent pool, his voter base seems to have an appetite for that. Also let's not pretend like private sector R&D has not been built over public sector research since forever. Seems like Trump wants to make public science more "efficient". Results still to be seen, but the perspective is not encouraging given the common wisdom on how basic science grows.

hundreds of millions of dollars in research funding has been cut across numerous sectors

We need to raise 1.63 Gazillion dollars to stay ahead of the game, to make sure that the newest models remain in the hands of an independent nonprofit acting for the benefit of all humanity, rather than some authoritarian regime... And investors willing to write a check for 1.63 Gazillion dollars require the prospect of profitability and hence a closed-source product.

Nash equilibrium.

Trying to create global enforcement against defection.

"Defect" is a dominant strategy, absent enforcement.

Not sure I buy that the payout matrix actually is the iterated prisoner's dilemma, but that's the argument.

My parents call all SUVs as 'Jeep's. I don't think it helps the company that makes Jeeps that much.