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Comment by WarmWash | Hacker News Reader

I don't see a situation where subscription payers move outside American LLMs (chatgpt, claude, gemini)

And I don't see a situation where serious API payers are OK with handing the Chinese state all their data. Like manufactures of decades past did and learned a hard, even existential, lesson for it. The state mantra has been "Collect and Copy" for a long time now, tech just hasn't had that moment to experience it yet.

So that leaves local hosting/leasing, but one of those has totally non-practical economics and the other doesn't have enough compute to meet any kind of real demand.

I also have yet to meet a single person who isn't neck-deep in the tech space mention a Chinese LLM. It's 100% the big American three.

If anything it's custom chips from the labs that threatens Nvidia.

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These open models serve as price / performance pressure. Not all tasks require frontier models and cheap open models can be quite good for in-app assistants, if you're building that sort of thing. We also aren't sure the subscriptions will continue to be sustainable. They're currently subsidized to the tune of 50-70x. As someone who is hitting limits weekly that would easily cost me over $10k month per sub.

What about the current situation, where serious API payers are increasingly OK with using open-weight models running on US providers?

https://www.ft.com/content/32a70a3c-7d28-40b4-808e-36edb58c7...

I can easily see a situation where most non American AI usage is on Chinese models on Chinese chips though.

Genuine question but who do you put as the "three" in big three.

Because I genuinely can't tell if you mean Google or SpaceX/X.ai lol.

Google probably serves more tokens then OAI and Anthropic combined, even if many of those tokens aren't from explicit gemini requests, but from AI overviews and other service integrations.

xAI is already selling spare compute, and basically exists just to gas spacex's perceived valuation.

Casual consumers are using American models because their usage is low. As usage scales, the economics heavily favor open weight models. The API pricing from American companies is absurd. This is particularly true in an enterprise setting.

Open weight model hosts don't have the compute to meet enterprise demand. A large part of why these models are so cheap is because overall demand for them is incredibly low. Back in May, Gemini alone was doing about a month's worth of Openrouter tokens every day.

I disagree totally. DeepSeek raised prices because they couldn’t serve the demand. But there are tons of American vendors ready to fulfill it. Many enterprises, including the one I work for, are swapping to open weights.

Why wouldn’t you?

I am not ok with handing all my data to American companies that are best friends with the American surveillance state. I still remember the Snowden revelations. Chinese companies are a much better option in that regard.

you don't have to hand them your data, the models are available so you can run them on bedrock yourself (or use another US housed inference service). and for what it's worth in my job i have access to data that gives a picture of the way companies are doing inference, and they're using a lot of chinese models (deepseek-v4 is a huge percentage of inference requests for example)

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