Comment by refulgentis

The really terrifying thing is the next logical step from the instinctual reaction. Eschew miracle, eschew the cognitive bias of feeling warm and fuzzy for the guy who gives you it for free.

Socratic version: how can the Chinese companies afford to make them and give them out for free? Cui bono?

n.b. it's not because they're making money on the API, ex. open openrouter and see how Moonshot or DeepSeek's 1st party inference speed compares to literally any other provider. Note also that this disadvantage can't just be limited to LLMs, due to GPU export rules.