Why though? That could be true of any economic condition. Imagine if any time there was a race or competition in which one group is winning you had to just say "for now".
Michael Phelps is winning the race! ... for now
China is winning the EV race ... for now
It doesn't seem to add value to me, aside from being an opportunity to, as is the time-honored tradition of the haters, to sow doubt and create negative energy to anything related to American success.
Of course US has a huge head start, but if AI keeps growing, what matters is how the market's gonna look like years from now.
Most of my clients using AI in the business workflows (in products) use Chinese LLMs, because after benchmarking for a specific use case you nearly always end up finding that you pay half or a tenth.
That's not a new phenomenon. I've adapted Gemini Flash 2.5 years and years ago when people were dissing it as "crap", yet it was the best budget and quality fit for the task I had at hand back then (translating and summarizing tons of documents). It was both faster and around 100 times cheaper than the best GPT 4 model available.
Needless to say, medium-sized Chinese models are far better than those LLMs and a perfect fit for countless applications.
Even with all the Qwens and Kimis and GLMs etc, the latest Gemini Flash models are still an insane value! I recently settled on 3.1 Flash Lite after testing basically everything on offer on OpenRouter, and it was not a close call - cheaper, faster, and better (for translation and visual understanding tasks).
Why though? That could be true of any economic condition. Imagine if any time there was a race or competition in which one group is winning you had to just say "for now".
Michael Phelps is winning the race! ... for now
China is winning the EV race ... for now
It doesn't seem to add value to me, aside from being an opportunity to, as is the time-honored tradition of the haters, to sow doubt and create negative energy to anything related to American success.
+1
Of course US has a huge head start, but if AI keeps growing, what matters is how the market's gonna look like years from now.
Most of my clients using AI in the business workflows (in products) use Chinese LLMs, because after benchmarking for a specific use case you nearly always end up finding that you pay half or a tenth.
That's not a new phenomenon. I've adapted Gemini Flash 2.5 years and years ago when people were dissing it as "crap", yet it was the best budget and quality fit for the task I had at hand back then (translating and summarizing tons of documents). It was both faster and around 100 times cheaper than the best GPT 4 model available.
Needless to say, medium-sized Chinese models are far better than those LLMs and a perfect fit for countless applications.
Even with all the Qwens and Kimis and GLMs etc, the latest Gemini Flash models are still an insane value! I recently settled on 3.1 Flash Lite after testing basically everything on offer on OpenRouter, and it was not a close call - cheaper, faster, and better (for translation and visual understanding tasks).
It’s interesting to see short term business interests again undermining American sovereignty.
Just as business exported strategically critical manufacturing to China, now it is helping funding China’s race to take over the US in AI and beyond.
Lesson is pure free trade doesn’t work if (a) not everyone is playing by the same rules and (b) the trading territories are or may become opposed.
American economic policy gave the world an authoritarian super power and Trump. Not a great track record.