go to 2024, western labs were crushing it.
it's now 2025, and from china, we have deepseek, qwen, kimi, glm, ernie and many more capable models keeping up with western labs. there are actually now more chinese labs releasing sota models than western labs.
They are lauded for the ability to cost ratio, or their ability to parameter ratio, but virtually everyone using LLMs for productive work are using ChatGPT/Gemini/Claude.
They are kind of like Huffy bicycles. Good value, work well, but if you go to any serious event, no one will be riding one.
This aligns with the benchmarks as well; they benchmark great for what they are, but still bottom of the barrel when competing for "state of the art."
And yes, it's great you daily Chinese models, but the vast majority of people try them, say "impressive", then go back to the most performant models.
while qwen, deepseek and kimi are opensourced and good, they are preferred because of their insane token ratio, they use a lot less for more, but a by product is that they are less accurate it is amazing progress by the chinese companies, but they definitely can improve a lot more
does it really feel like they have a chance to recover all the expenses in the future?
crypto grifters pivoted to ai and, same as last time, normal people don’t want to have anything to do with them.
considering the amount of money burned on this garbage, i think we can at least declare a looser.