Comment by switchbak
13 hours ago
That’s only one metric. It doesn’t matter how cheap it is, if it continually fails to solve a problem.
Yes they’re getting better. No, I don’t think this will be a panacea. If only for the fact that this is China (more specifically the CCP) after all - they’ve got their own plan, and altruism is not part of it.
TBH it doesn't need to completely solve a problem.
I can use GLM to do in 2 hours what would have previously taken me a week.[1] Switch to Astra or Fable might take that down to 1 hour, maybe.
The difference is not so big when you look at it that way.
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[1] Actually, no, but let's pretend for the sake of argument that SOTA models can 10x - 40x your productivity.
Have you actually used the latest Chinese models? Because, in my experience, they're not just cheaper, they're actually better in many cases. In one recent experiment I did a few days ago on a task that I need in production at scale at my company, Qwen 3.8 and GLM 5.3 Flash were not just cheaper, the results were significantly higher quality than GPT 5.6 Sol.
Even if China doesn't continue to release this stuff for free, I think somebody will. Eventually, maybe Europe or maybe a smaller country that picks up this knowledge will. Or maybe just some random philanthropic billionaire.
Yes, I use the messing Chinese models extensively. Like you, I very much appreciate them and sometimes prefer them.
But there is a bar of complexity at which they fail, and repeated invocations typically doesn’t make much progress. This is a small subset of most work, but it still exists. And yes you can help it along, but in those cases I’d typically break out the big guns.
> Qwen 3.8 and GLM 5.3 Flash were not just cheaper, the results were significantly higher quality
How can they be higher quality than models they were distilled from?
> How can they be higher quality than models they were distilled from?
The word "distillation" is not specific to AIs, has been in use for 100s of years, and does not mean the same thing as "dilution".
It means "getting a more concentrated form of the original product".
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