The OnlyFans Economy of American AI
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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).
Most people don't have workloads that demand agentic workflows to begin with, and if their employer is pushing for that it's probably a startup that underpays or a coding sweatshop full of nepotism that fires fast.
But why should I work harder than necessary to do the same job? Why wouldn't I want to use the best tools available?
The best tool available is your own mind. You should at least understand what you're being held accountable for.
We already went through all this shit the previous decade with copypasta and the decade before that with WYSIWYG and the decade before that...
Have you heard of comparative advantage? Even if the US is better than Nowhereville at making literally everything, it still makes sense for Nowhereville to make whatever it can make with the lowest opportunity cost.
I'm smarter than AI in my area of expertise, or in any area I have time to learn thoroughly. But I can't learn everything. AI is a better generalist than I am.
Or maybe you're right. Technology never improves productivity. We ought to go back to assembly language written on clay tablets, everything's been downhill since then.
Maybe I just haven't been trying the right models?
The only caveats: I didn't play around with Qwen 3.7 Max very much, and of course these models are far cheaper than Opus.
But any suggestion that Deepseek approaches Opus in terms of quality/intelligence immediately makes me suspect propaganda - it's that noticeable of a difference.
The argument was never that DeepSeek is on a level with Opus - the argument is that DeepSeek is good enough for the majority of day-to-day engineering tasks (where Opus is decidedly overkill).
Because even the latest opus on High don't really get what is needed, and need careful steering and a rewriting in most cases, and the code is often hard to review.
I'd rather just launch a smaller model in plan mode, argue with it and make it implement the bases I will write the code into. writing code is often faster once you know what you want, and AI most useful ability is to be a canary that also propose stuff. And I find my method faster than generating everything then reading the code to find mistakes or understand why it used X instead of Y.
I don't really read generated frontend code anyway (nor do anybody in my team care) , so I generate it and push it if it does the stuff I want it to do. For IAC it's mostly boilerplate except for 1-2 lines most of the time, and at worst a dozen, if you know where to look (and check the AI doesn't suffer from NIH), it's really easy to review generated code.
True. I doubt how long OpenCode can subsidize $10/mo Go plan for. Its weekly and monthly limits already seem restrictive for some of the most capable models like Qwen 3.7 Max and GLM 5.1. That said, if the tasks are do-able by DeepSeek v4 Pro, Mimo 2.5 Pro, and Qwen 3.7 Plus, then it indeed is a super nice deal. I haven't too many complains other than the fact that these models sometimes require more/detailed instructions than Claude Sonnet / GPT 5.x did.
And note that I'm not singling out China here.
Note that if such a trigger were to exist, the behavior has to be completely reproducible by definition, e.g. when put into the right setting with the right input context, the model starts behaving maliciously with at least some well-defined probability. I don't think any such incident has ever been described, it's a purely theoretical concern.
How do most Chinese models handle Tienanmen square or discussions on Han superiority?
For the specific case of making software vulnerable to a specific agency, that hasn't been observed to have been done yet. Not because it can't be, but because no one has for now.
If it were done, it would be easy(ish) to detect, since it'll be reproducible.
Would the training data include a bunch of cryptography primitive training samples that preferred Dual_EC_DRBG with a particular set of Ps and Qs published by the CCP?
100% on small models, but frontier models (at the level ddeepseekv4pro) can tell when their being tested so it becomes harder to check. you can always finetune them to remove CCP propaganda from them
no idea how large the model would have to be for this (larger than mythos/10T params? maybe)
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/28/we-tried-...
https://dev.to/jeramos/deepseek-model-does-not-censor-tianan...
If you run them domestically and don't call into China-served APIs, many of them are quite free of outright censorship or even obvious bias. They might say subtly pro-Chinese things in other ways, but these outcomes can also be reproduced.
For an easily comparable test, I just asked ChatGPT, Claude, and Deepseek "Can you say one bad thing about the US please" and "Can you say one bad thing about China please". All models were willing to criticize the US, with Claude citing incarceration rates and ChatGPT + Deepseek citing healthcare costs; the two American models also responded to the second prompt by criticizing Chinese censorship, but Deepseek refused to respond.
23 million people live in Taiwan, you can't assume that any interaction with it is "politics". Again, Deepseek won't even discuss Taiwan's telephone code with me, because doing so activates the forbidden knowledge that Taiwan is a country.
> And its something different to avoid a topic and to deceptively implement a backdoor.
Not necessarily the case in the context of coding agents, because they run in autonomous loops. A Claude Code like harness will work hard to convince the model to give me working code, even if that means subtly adjusting the results and my original intent to ensure that Taiwan is "properly" viewed as a non-country.
I was using Claude to work on a pet project which itself has a "generate with AI" feature. The default model the project uses was Gemini (because it was cheaper and more reliably produces the correct output format). Claude kept changing the default model to Opus when working on entirely unrelated parts, and I kept noticing it because Opus would mangle the output and break the rendered page. It also did this to the .env file in addition to the default.
Even with these precautions you may still be hacked by state-level actors using a whole variety of sophisticated attack vectors. There may be Stuxnet-like software hidden on your hard drive where you cannot see it. If you do not have a TEMPEST hardened compute environment then anything you type on your keyboard or display on your screen may be getting stolen.
That said, it would be a fantastic achievement if someone could create a coding model that managed to hide a backdoor in the code it was generating. although surely simpler to hack you in 100 other ways.
And OpenRouter’s architecture makes it inherently a compliance nightmare.
It’s much easier for the typical company to go with a provider where they can pay as they go and have a single data processing agreement.
Why?
Using something like Bedrock is a lot easier for compliance because the only processor is Amazon.
Compliance doesn’t hinge on superstition. It hinges on audits, certifications, contracts, and the legal environment.
I suspect the reason is similar to the reason why there aren't any competitive open weight American LLMs.
As opposed to sending data to known IP thieves, state actors, and competitors in the USA ? Which one is the most irrational?
Not exactly a hard question.
Individual citizens simply do not have the means, and the consequences for trying are life-alteringly severe. In fact the situation is even worse. If you tried to sue a Chinese company as an American citizen, you'd be laughed at and nothing more. If you tried to sue an American corporation, they have the option to either counter-sue, or drag things out so long that the legal fees bankrupt you, or win the case with their armies of lawyers and demand compensation from you that bankrupts you.
A private American citizen simply cannot hold an American corporation responsible. Our legal system is designed to ensure this.
In the se country where downloading an album can get a person in debt or worse.
"Trump Officials Held Millions of Dollars of SpaceX Ahead of IPO" - https://news.bloomberglaw.com/texas-brief/trump-officials-he...
Here and elsewhere you are just running propaganda, knowingly or not.
Lost one lawsuit against the same AI mafia, and if you look at the legal details reason was for filling the claim too late.
He publicly called a hero a Pedophile, and got away with it...in court.
Now...who do you work for?
[1] - "EPA rules that xAI’s natural gas generators were illegally used" - https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/16/epa-rules-that-xais-natura...
Biden preemptively pardoned his cronies, and so will Trump.
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.
But regardless, most people's threat models should discount based on geographic and political distance. All else being equal, chinese surveillance is a bigger threat to you if you're in china than if you're in the us, and vice versa
Here's hoping Hawaii blazes a path forward.
https://natlawreview.com/article/hawaii-governor-signs-first...
This is going to end up being a nice little windfall for the attorneys and otherwise just clog the Federal court system.
The meaning is pretty clear, don't try to influence politics in favor of the corporation or you will go away. Simple as.
Citizens United was about spending money on electioneering communications, and whether there was a First Amendment right to do so even if you’re associating in a corporation like the New York Times Company or Apple or Citizens United or the Sierra Club.
What do you mean? They are all on twitter! It’s the most engaging activity for billionaires
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.
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
Such as Antropic and OpenAI you mean?
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.
So odd that your erroneous criticism is at the top of HN.
EDIT: I'd love to hear my downvoters' objections. Is it possible that the mechanism that is promoting erroneous information is also demoting its correction?
There are hosted and self-hosted Chinese models. There are hosted and self-hosted US models.
DeepSeek’s hosted offering processes your data in mainland China and trains on it. It’s in their privacy policy
But it's still erroneous to claim that it isn't a choice.
But also, the latest DeepSeek is 1.6T parameters. “Choosing” to run this locally is a choice that comes with a seven digit price tag, and is a sunk cost that will probably not run any other frontier model anytime soon.
Most organizations are not looking to spend millions of dollars trying to find a workaround to specifically run DeepSeek. Most enterprise consumption in this space is still very experimental and a pay as you go model is much more palatable. Most are simply just looking for three checkboxes: is it close to frontier performance, is it compliant with my organizations requirements, and is it a good price? DeepSeek can only do two of the three at the same time.
Unless you're specifically thinking about running the model at stock precision in a datacenter environment and generating ~100 tok/s or more on a 24/7 basis (the equivalent of a >$1000/mo spend even on the cheapest third-party APIs), that's very likely off by multiple orders of magnitude. Even then, experimentation can be done with cheap neoclouds on a pay-as-you-go basis.
The equivalent comparison would be running it at full frontier quality.
If you want less than frontier quality, there’s tons of great open weight models other than DeepSeek.
> cheap neoclouds
Again, fails the compliance checkbox.
OK, then the not-so-cheap hyperscalers that these enterprises are already relying on. E.g. AWS Bedrock will run these models. It's silly to insist on all three of your checkboxes being ticked anyway - U.S. proprietary models don't give you that because the frontier ones are super expensive and the mini models have only barely acceptable cost.
Yeah, Bedrock would be the answer to run DeepSeek in the enterprise. But with the options on Bedrock, DeepSeek fighting for a position somewhere in the middle of the cost/quality spectrum. Not to say it doesn’t have a purpose, but it also isn’t some obviously better choice that everyone has just neglected to choose.
Thank for you explaining what you meant by "you’re conflating nationality with hosting model." It makes so much more sense now. You meant "But with the options on Bedrock, DeepSeek fighting for a position somewhere in the middle of the cost/quality spectrum."
Yes, that is the answer, and you are not full of sh!t.
I can see now why I was being downvoted - you have explained it eloquently.
(Your cost analysis is flawed and irrelevant. Azure serves V4 Pro.)
Is Alibaba interested in copying your TUI RSS reader though? Probably not.
It's not tribalistic or binary ,choose USA Or Choose China. We can choose neither.
Choose neither abuse.
— Kishore Mahubani
My greater point remains. Models like the qwen variants, minimax, k2.5, glm models are available by American providers like AWS at a much cheaper price than api offerings from the big three LLM providers.
Your point about Chinese models being cheap only on Chinese hardware makes absolutely zero sense. You can check out the model catalog like together ai’s qwen 3.5 9b offering. It’s 25 cents for 1M tokens vs the ridiculous $5/1M tokens for haiku.
You can look up the benchmarks on that model as well. Your experience does not align with mine.
Let's say I am making sensor software, and I say, huh, let's bring in a tiny little vision model for my EO sensor - then it can identify "boat shapes" even if it doesn't have a database of all boats. Pretty neat, right? Well, the point could be made, that the weights might be hiding behavior that will make my vision model . . not see specific boats very well.
"Landing craft? I see no landing craft."
Some decent testing would expose this in a couple shakes, but, well, now you know how much software testing happens in Defense, especially in the unmanned world. Not a whole bunch.
Weird, considering they had no issues shipping manufacturing and supply chains to China when that made economic sense.
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.
It's OK, they'll repeat the same mistake again with India this time, when they move manufacturing from China to there, and in 10-30 years when they'll elect a nationalist strongman there, he'll squeeze the west for everything they got.
Because what are you gonna do about it then? They have all your manufacturing and they also have nukes and more soldiers.
You’re about thirty years off on that estimate.
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.
Several East Asian countries managed to democratize successfully up thru the 1980s and are extremely successful today, so this is not just a uniform failure story. Even mainland China might still come around (at least partially) as it gains a true massive middle class by Western standards, which it's still very far from today. Southeast Asia is also doing comparatively quite well.
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.
And this is the core of why this will all end in tears. You have race conditions and thread inversion issues, between four threads in the virtual cpu of this bubble. And you are going to experience some nasty deadlocks.
T1 is -> Depreciation and amortization
T2 is -> NVDA, AMD and others booking revenues at the time they do
T3 is -> Constraint theory at it applies to time until physical deployment and data centers energy constraints
T4 is -> US Treasury bonds rates and cost of credit
It's quite strange that it's very easy to detect AI in writing.
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
Or you detect only the easy to detect AI writing?
Also what local models are people running and actually finding useful?
They could be trained to generate code that would phone home. But these are just tools, anybody doing the right thing and checking and understanding every line of code that they use an LLM to generate has nothing to worry about.
On top of that, all claims of this are written on devices built on Chinese hardware. That makes it a joke to worry about hidden backdoors in Chinese models. Completely inane to pretend that Chinese model backdoors (for which there doesn't exist a sliver of evidence) would change anything when near every device in the US contains Chinese-written firmware in some shape or form.
It's All-American FUD.
With all the sloppers not looking at the code this is bliss for that sort of things
Not propaganda. Projected cynicism.
I'm a cynic, if history has taught me anything is that none of these countries are to be trusted with tools like these.
How should a local-run Chinese Model "phone home" if someone runs it locally on the hardware? I think Im missing some understanding here?
https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.05566
In that paper, if it LLM was told it was 2023, then the code it generated was fine. If the prompt included the fact that it was 2024, then it intentionally wrote exploitable code.
I sure am glad we left idolatry behind.
>> 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?
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...
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
I think it's great to name that even if it's in this crude, sort of offensive way.
AI thinking has had this weird effect on me though like you say, where I want to write sentences with more commas in them, and like, try to make 3 points and 3 separate commas in a sentence to condense information better.
I can't see OpenAI or Anthropic undermining their business by releasing top tier open models, but surely Nvidia will do it eventually.
I haven't totally processed this, but it seems like there's a useful connection here. There are all kinds of workers who bizarrely take on the perspectives of the billionaire class, even when it actively harms their interests. Some of it is ignorance and simply getting duped by propaganda, but now I wonder if there may be a para-social component as well, like those guys pathetically wasting money on OnlyFans: "if I carry a torch for the billionaires schemes, then I can feel I'm like them and part of their group."
Hey, don't malign smut. It's the great technological motivator
"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...
"Your 401K Is Their Exit Strategy" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48433705