These price and speed optimization from Chinese providers, combined with the raising prices from American ones will change the game sooner than later. Many companies are finding issues with the AI bills already.
I genuinely don't understand what moat these US model labs have. If they're saying recursive self improvement is just around the corner and Chinese labs are only slightly behind the leading US models, what moat does the US labs have? Are the US models going to recursively self improve better than the Chinese open source ones or something?
I might be completely wrong about this, but if I had money in OpenAI or Anthropic I'd be pulling it all right now. I think the chance of them going to near-zero over the next few years is very significant.
Or Google. I'm working with multiple customers right now that are very pissed at Google for deprecating Gemini 2.5 Flash, canning the GA release of 3.0 Flash and now have to decide whether to bite the bullet of the 5x price increase for 3.5 Flash or switching providers. Quite a few of them will likely fully pivot to open models.
The only ones I've seen switch to 3.1 Flash Lite were from 2.5 Flash Lite, and all for the most simple use cases, e.g. small UX enhancements.
i've a Github copilot yearly subscription. Microsoft recently changed their billing to based on token. i'm still getting billed per premium request but GPT 5.4 is now 6x compare to 1x before.
You are right to be scared, because this race to the bottom also provides open weights/models/qat’s for the rest of us and it’s been crazy to see how good they can be on a consumer grade RTX card.
For non subsidized plans? Pretty sure they'd need to put this in ToS, or law suites would have followed by now.
Sometimes Opus just gives me a rubbish session.
2. They are doing lots of shady stuff that would have gotten someone else banned from visa/mastercard. Your paid off plan literally changes after billing...
I think people are letting them fly for now, because if it turns out true that they'll have AGI they want to be on their good side? We might see the knifes getting pulled otherwise.
30 day eval for each.
I'm seeing some people say flash is amazing and can handle everything, and some say it's useless. It seems to depend on the task. I think it depends on the harness too (it works better in Claude Code in my experience, it's probably been trained on that).
it has limitations but it is way better than I expect from something named Flash that is open source.
My current workflow involves going from PRD -> execution plan -> build -> review, and this works nicely with open weight models like GLM 5.1, Kimi K2.6, and DeepSeek V4 Flash. With Opus I can generally skip the PRD entirely, and sometimes even skip the plan, and 80-90% of the time it does exactly what I want. But that can easily burn $5-15 for one feature, whereas it'll cost maybe $1-2 with the open weight models (at API pricing).
That's the main thing I've noticed. Small models can follow instructions just fine. If the instructions are very specific. Then I often have to spend more time explaining a task than it would have taken me to do it myself.
The bigger models have a lot more common sense.
I wonder if that could be improved slightly through prompting. Asking it to clarify anything that's confusing. Or maybe it just makes incorrect assumptions without realizing the ambiguity. One way to find out!
Though, I tend to use it as a pair programmer so just stop it and provide guidance.
The real problem is that it is excessively verbose - it's impossible to keep up with it's train of thought, and not practical to read it all. So I tend it just let it do it's thing then skim a bit and skip to the end for it's summary.
Try opencode go subscription - you get the Chinese models for 6x discount. I use like $1 a day...
This is at least my experience with Claude Code as harness. Also, GLM pricing is not that far off from Claude. It's cheaper but not DeepSeek cheap.
On HN China is seen as a cheap labor copycat. This used to be a fair approximation at some point in the past. In my opinion China is getting ahead of everyone else much more than US used to be.
SF is a beautiful thing in the US, vast power and wealth comes from there. Smart people collaborating communicating and building fast and with excitement. China did SF kind of thing for many different sectors in many different places.
The $0.87/M tokens price for Mimo Pro is probably subsidized.
Mimo models aren't widely available on western providers, but Kimi and Deepseek are similar sizes and cost about the same to run. They are priced $3-$4/M tokens (which is right were Google's very confused range of Flash models are priced at: between $0.40/M tokens and $9/M tokens depending on exactly which model - and you don't want the $9 one!).
Anthropic overprices Sonnet (probably because of their capacity issues). GPT 5.4 mini is $4.50/M tokens.
Mimo is also widely available on western providers. It's on openrouter and you can sign up with Xiaomi directly for a token plan on an English website priced in dollars.
It was pretty clear the USA won World War 2 because it out produced and out innovated everyone else. Probably with that in mind, after World War 2 the USA adopted the "Vannevar Bush" model, summarised in this picture: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/annevar-Bushs-Science-th... The idea is to jump start R&D through public funding. The hoped for outcome was that R&D feed private enterprise, leading to a productivity boom.
The boom happened, and the USA did seem to out-compete everybody else in R&D, science, and the products they delivered for decades after that.
That way of doing things seems to have faded over time in the USA. The decline seemed to coincide with the rise of Neo-econmics, and now of course it's been obliterated by Trump. He's very keen to fund Intel to produce chips in a year or two's time (which is something the stock market and banks do perfectly well), but funding basic science is getting drastic cuts.
Still other countries noticed the rise of the USA, and some adopted similar funding models for basic R&D. China seems to have picked it up with gusto, both subsidising R&D and STEM training, leading to huge numbers of engineers and scientists. Whether it will lead to an economic boom remains unknown, but acceleration of ideas and innovations coming out of China seems undeniable. More recently, Ukraine showered its local engineering garages with funds in the hopes of getting a similar outcome to the USA in WW2. It looks like it worked. If the Iran war continues, it's entirely possible arms trade will reverse: the USA could well start buying drones off Ukraine.