Anyone else more excited about Chinese models than American models these days? Big thing for me is affordability.
And later they further cut Sol and Terra pricing by 20% (maybe only in the API) and Luna by 80%.
In fact Luna still outperformed DeepSeek Flash 4.1 in cost per task on Artificial Analysis when I last checked.
However, Luna is slightly less intelligent. I have a feeling that it's pretty dumb and prone to hallucination unless running at xhigh or max effort, where it somehow manages to work quite well.
I did not personally test the open weight models beyond the old Qwen 3.6 27B, which produced unusably bad results for me.
The competition is great, and I hope Chinese models will continue to force leading US labs to offer models at a low price point.
That said, I don't think the Chinese labs have anything over OpenAI and Anthropic when it comes to capability or efficiency - I have no reason not to believe the US labs have even lower cost to serve the models.
Do also remember China is this far in the AI race despite all chip restrictions from America. If they were in equal standards I truly think Chinese models would have long surpassed American ones. Also would like to remind how Anthropic CEO is being hostile and blaming Chinese models with distilling meanwhile their own models claimed to be Qwen¹ and their stance against open models is negative² and they still keep blaming China for it.
1- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48671252
2-https://www.anthropic.com/news/position-open-weights-models
Why wouldn't he? If there really was 25,000 accounts breaking ToS any CEO would at minimum be upset. Evidence of Claude distilling qwen would be damning but that a) makes no sense b) doesn't exist afaik.
Is this even true?
I don't trust a single word that comes out of thr people behind Anthropic/OpenAI.
Chinese models kept improving in capability regardless, and are in some ways more impressive than Claude/ChatGPT.
So yeah, I think they are bulshitters. The can create reports and send letter to congress simply because they know if allowed to compete freely the Chinese models will eventually prevail.
Also, very rich of you to mention Chinese firms record on IP theft when Anthropic and OpenAI are companies entirely built on large scale IP theft.
Both can be true
Given the difference in compute, it seems plausible.
However, the researchers at the US labs are surely no less talented, and they have better access to hire talent globally.
They too have to serve their models efficiently at a large scale, and with current capacity constraints this must be a top priority.
What do you think is motivating the Chinese labs, benevolence?
Limitations often lead to creativity to overcome them. The Chinese AI labs have had to focus much more on efficiency so they got good at it. Meanwhile breaking new ground is often harder than replicating it. So even if they had matching compute it's not a given they'd be better.
So you don't have much perspective on things, it seems. Let me introduce you to the GLM 5.2 and then 5.3/5.3 flash series of... "oh, wow, I should have bought some RTX PRO 6000's while they were 'cheap'" stage of progression.
As someone carrying multiple max subscriptions to both claude and codex - primary workhorse is glm 5.3 flash running on rented GPUs for less than a latte/hr.
I also found qwen 3.6 27B nearly useless for my own needs. DS4 flash 0731 and then 4.1 have been nearly as eye opening as glm 5.3 flash, but have their own warts.
Or I guess the other way around, if GLM 5.3 Flash is so good, why Claude and Codex?
OpenAI reduced prices and Anthropic increased weekly usage limits.
As a Max x20 and Pro x20 subscriber, can tell you that it doesn't matter since they continually move the baseline of token use So in practice you feel that you're continually getting less from your subscription.
While it never happened to me in the past, i reached my weekly limit within 3 days using Opus 5. And the Open AI weekly limit essentially is a Claude Max x20 5-hour limit. Not even talking about the baseline in intelligence : on release day Astra was so good that it lead me to move to Pro x20. Now it's dumb af and token use is insane.
Deepseek 4.1 Flash has been a lifeboat for me, finally able to work without being constrained/distracted by limits and with what is in my view even better intelligence than Opus 5 for a fraction of the costs. DS is not messing up my brain with load-bearing pseudo jargon in every sentence. It respects coding guidelines, and completes even the most complex tasks most of the time in one shot.
DS 4.1 had been able to add complex features to my repo without breaking a sweat (330k lines of F# + 4M circa lines of an Angular frontend). Writes very idiomatic F# and respects our guidelines and style perfectly. Just completed an extensive UI/UX research and implementation work.
I am ditching both x20 subs and will only keep a Pro x5 because wife does a lot of design work and needs solid image generation capabilities.
I just had like four big sessions going today, paid about $8 in tokens. I see no reason to pay more, this is more than I need for intelligence.
My impression of DSv4.1-flash was very positive aside from this. But that was enough for me to stick with GLM-5.3(-flash), which both gave me consistently great results
I was using a vibe coded bare bones harness. I was wondering if this was normal from DSv4.1-flash, or if its my harnesses fault.
So if you use MCP a lot, simplify the params, be more lenient on validation and rework the errors.
It is quite good with shell.
No mcp support. I'll try copying deepseek harness's basic tool call formats as a starting point.
glm 5.3 flash is a tad slower but a bit more capable and way more token efficient.
Source: self hosted tested on rented GB200 node at 8bit.
ds 4.1 is lightning fast though. Also much better in image recognition.
I'm just not going to build long term infra that depends on something that another person can and will - objectively based on experience - take away from me at some unknown point in the future.
The biggest benefit of open models is they keep all the other players honest. The extent to which they feel they can dictate terms is directly set by the threshold where they feel people will take the trade to run open models instead.
I really think they have drunk too much of their own kool aid and become completely detached from what the market wants.
Months ago I switched entirely to use Chinese model. Mostly DeepSeek and MiMo, although I recently started to play with GLM as well.
The models are excellent and in many ways I prefer them to Claude.
I see no difference in terms of capability, but the fact that they are cheap frees me to experiment.
debatable if a turn around is possible before '29
China was never ahead of the USA in AI. So perhaps a more proper analogy is the Moon landing. In real history the side that lost the race never got its mojo back...
I expect this to happen within 12-18 months, the differentiation has shrunk, many models are now sufficiently capable for most tasks
I was simply saying that when (not if) Chinese AI models will pass Americans, it will probably be game over and Americans will never catch up, let alone become leaders again.
Check the names of the researchers in the DeepSeek's latest paper. Full of Chinese names. Check the list of names in Google's paper. A very similar view. Anecdotal, but quite thought-provoking...
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/science/nobel-winning-us-...
So maybe one day Chinese models will squeeze out the American ones, but today is not that day.
So no, I am not excited about Chinese models ( just because its open weight and not American).
Here on HN was a post few days ago titled like "so you want to use openrouter", there was a benchmark in capabilities between providers which showed some aggressively quantize and basically break models and tool calling.
I am in no way a professional power user, but I frequently suffered from "call fails" (e.g. unclosed tags, broken agent loop, broken thinking blocks), so I had to babysit agent on it's loop. After I blacklisted like 20 providers (I think most broken were Nebius and DigitalOcean) these issues completely went away. I had several agents work on my small tasks for 18+ hours with no issues.
One simple task: I needed an LLM to go through and clean up a few thousand page descriptions and titles in my personal search engine index, where the human web page authors had put in no effort sigh. I did a shoot out between Claude, Luna, GLM 5.3 Flash and Deepseek. Despite the high cost, Claude's descriptions were terrible, and even Opus warned me that the descriptions coming back from Haiku were "generalized, not accurate". I expected I would choose Luna because of price, and occasionally it did have wonderful descriptions (one captured emotion in a way no other model did). But in the end, the GLM 5.3 Flash descriptions were the easiest to read, they flow well while also being accurate & including necessary keywords, and being highly affordable. So it won out. It's a task that is nowhere near frontier, but a task where somehow China is better than frontier.
But at least I can run Chinese models locally, and strip a lot of that censorship/refusal.
The difference is China has a good reason to. China doesn't look appealing because they're more moral than anyone else, but what they have going for them is that they still behave like a rational actor. At least their behavior is intelligible in terms of their own interests. The world can deal with a long term selfish superpower but not an unhinged one
I don't think there's a person in China that has as much of a seething hatred for America's 'allies' in Europe as J.D. Vance or half of the American techbro commentariat does