Comment by Der_Einzige

> is estimated at 10 months by Anthropic themselves, and it's growing.

How is this different than any business with something to lose saying a competitor isn't as good? Not saying it's false, but it would seem to me that it's more important how customers feel about the issue.

> The gap between Chinese models and American frontier models is estimated at 10 months by Anthropic themselves, and it's growing.

There's a lot of subjectivity in determining this, but I'm 100% sure that 10 months is wrong.

I don't know whether the gap is currently growing, but I'm not sure it matters. There are thresholds where models reach certain levels of usefulness. Opus 4.8, for example, is at a level where I can give it relatively vague input, and it can go for half an hour on its own and produce a high-quality PR.

If GLM reaches that level of capability and can do that task more cheaply than Anthropic's model, I will use GLM for that task, because that's a specific type of task I use models for. It doesn't really matter whether Anthropic also has a better model, because what does "better" mean in this context? It's a clearly defined task, and Opus 4.8 already does it at a very high level of quality.

Ah, well, if Anthropic says their competitors are ten months behind...

I don't know what I was thinking.

Here in Australia the sudden withdrawal of Fable made all of us think hard about models and harnesses.

I've heard half a dozen people talk about how a less advanced model coupled with a better harness outperforms a smarter model in the last few weeks.

If the USA wanted to shoot its AI industry in the foot it achieved its goal.

If Anthropic themselves say competition is 10 months behind, it's probably 5 or less.

And you seem to think "no one uses" DeepSeek's v4, z.AI's GLM 5.2 or Xiaomi's MiMo 2.5 from their official APIs when they probably dwarf Anthropic's usage and are widening the gap due to conquering a chunk of Western market too.

I know it's hard for some to comprehend there's an entire Eastern hemisphere in the globe with billions of people, so it's worth reminding. And some seem to think the world is basically silicon valley even.