Comment by wxw

Taking inspiration is one thing, this is just a knock-off. The visual language is nearly identical.

"Good artists copy, great artists steal, the best artists make lies seem true." – Steve Jobs.

Actually, Jobs self-servingly refactored then misattributed to Picasso the line,

  "Good artists copy, great artists steal."

Jobs did seem to properly remarket Picasso's intent, though, as Picasso had said:

  "When there's anything to steal, I steal."

  "What does it mean, an artist copies? It is normal. The important thing is to do it better."

  "Art is a series of masterly thefts."

"Everything is a Remix" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRHRUNpWzAY

It wasn't controversial because there was about 200 years of prior art from sailing ships.

(Before the wheel, ships were steered with tillers - which early cars also tried, interface-wise.)

I highly recommend to anyone that uses them a lot - try to clone your own. I’ve got mine fully formed into how I want it, with features I haven’t seen anywhere else yet and with integration into everything I work with. We’ve lived in a world where every app had to fit enough people well enough - but now we live in a world where an app can be molded to be absolutely perfect for just you!

But dont you have to be faithful to rl environment in which it model was trained in the harness?

only labs knows what the rl enviroment was so they will always be one step ahead.

There are but then you're required to pay API prices for them which can end up costing significant multiples of the price of the subscription.

Vs code copilot lets you bring your own api key for services like open router. But it usually only makes sense to do this with the Chinese models because OpenAI/Google/Anthropic heavily punish you for not using their proprietary lock in harness.

American labs will do fine with monthly subscriptions costing $20-300/month. They will not do fine for heavy basic LLM API calls -- it is for this that the cheap API produces substantial savings. Specialized niche provisions, e.g. excellent tool use, reliable structured output, reliable long context, cached and uncached web search, document reads, computer use, integrations, etc. also will take time for the foreign services to be good at.

If you remove the word "AI" from your post it also describes the last 20 or so years of US/Chinese economic competition. They are real, serious competitor but also there is a lot of value in that last 10%. Some buyers need the best and you can charge a premium for it.

The speed in which a copier can catch up to a leader is faster than every before, but everything is faster these days. I think the threat is if can these labs catch up and pass American labs while keeping costs low, but I don't see that happening.

China isn't undercutting anything. Kimi has to be hosted somewhere and is extraordinarily expensive to operate at Fable-levels of capabilities. The moat is (and will always be) the cost to actually operate these models, and that cost will continue to soar, it will not reverse, and the hardware will never keep up such that at-home use somehow becomes economical.

It's like releasing a cutting edge search engine, proclaimed to be on par with Google. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, you need to actually run it somewhere. One of the core moats for Google has been the cost to scale and compete globally with a search engine, which only a few entities on earth could even attempt. Somehow the HN crowd forgets this every single time. The same claims were endlessly made regarding Uber, as though the app was the hardest part of competing with Uber. Here's a hint: the model isn't the only super hard part of the total process at this point. Try running something akin to GPT 5.6 for a billion users, see how much that costs.

The winners will be the owners of the subscriptions and API usage. That's going to be OpenAI and Anthropic as of now, possibly Google will stay in the fight with their scale advantage focused on the consumer. It will never be the open weight models out of China. Who is going to invest the trillion dollars into infrastructure needed to run the latest version of Kimi 3-5 years out, for a billion users? There's only one entity that would ever consider it, and that's China domestic.

And the real money (for a sustainable business model allowing for constant massive reinvestment & infrastructure maintenance) is in pairing up advertising, which is another spot where the open weight models from China will never compete. It doesn't matter if the HN crowd hates this outcome, nothing will stop it from being the future core of mass consumer usage. And the business use will stay with subscription + API use as well: the best option for that today is OpenAI and Anthropic.

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People endlessly claimed the same thing about DeepSeek upon its release. they claim it every single time a very large cutting edge model is released out of China. It's a combination of propaganda, some truth, and the faux open culture desperation to see big tech get destroyed (somehow better if big China takes its place instead).