Competition drives prices down. We tried Kimi and GLM models after hitting 'cybersecurity' blocks on OpenAI and Anthropic. We found them to be much cheaper to access and helped us complete our work without 'cybersecurity' refusals blocking us.
I think your question is rhetorical, in which case I agree with the sentiment.
The US absolutely could (and very well might) make Chinese models illegal, possibly open weight models in general, but all that will do is keep them out of the hands of law abiding US citizens.
Law breakers in the US and the entire rest of the world would still have access, and nothing in the US will be any safer. People who think regulation will solve the problem should be embarrassed by their ignorance.
I don't get why people think Chinese models could bring openai and anthropic to their knees. There are zero signs of such a scenario. In fact the market is still growing at a gigantic pace. Quality of American models is still AAA. Chinese will have their place. But they are unmatched by their American rivals.
> But they are unmatched by their American rivals.
Kimi K3.1 is top 5 on AA and half the price of Opus 5.5, Qwen4 is coming soon. There is near zero difference for most tasks, so it matters less today and even less as time goes on. Price is now the top concern for a reason.
Banning open weight models in the US would provide the rest of the world with a huge business advantage since these models are much more cost-effective than US models.
> If you are a legally operating company in the US just saying it's banned is enough, the threat of enforcement is enough pressure.
Is there precedent for the US actually "banning" software? I know for example the Kaspersky ban and tiktok ban, but both of those were either banning the sales or banning the service. IIRC neither made the actual software illegal.
What is an example of a specific software being illegal to possess? What is an example of a specific software being illegal to use if it is not used to break other laws (copyright, etc.) or talks to banned service providers?
Closest thing I can think of is restricting the export of cryptography in the 90's, but that was not even close to what you are suggesting.
Correct it’s 7% chance on kalshi, and those 7% of people are just wrong. I know everyone likes to larp that the US is some kind of dictatorship, but lol, lmao as they say.
Also on the “how” side so far we have “they will just announce that “they” are banned, hilarious.
Personally I've found Zed's agent to be much superior to OpenCode. IDK why but it gets better results from the same model on the same task. Using with GLM 5.3 and DeepSeek 4.1.
A few bucks will realistically last you forever.
I also bought a DGX Spark at launch. I've learned a ton. but it's not usually my daily driver. I do run overnight tasks on it, like "read this book and write up notes on each chapter..."
In retrospect, given the dirt cheap prices of apis and or renting hardware, buying hardware for inference was likely a mistake (but not enough of a mistake to sell it now).
> You can’t show ROI to investors by cutting inference costs
You can as long as you can saturate hardware with profit that makes up for training costs (which are also in free fall).
Anthropic is most at risk since they haven't bought any hardware (afaik), however OpenAi is building custom silicon now. The rest of Mag7 are primarily hardware vendors
Any sources on training costs in free fall? My understanding was training costs are proportional to model size. Is it just that compute costs are falling?
It’s both competition almost 3 way , cheaper open source , a clearly lagging behind a bit open ai that cuts prices to win Anthropic customers .
There was an interesting technical advantage by some models where Anthropic as a leader start loosing dramatically in speed too. 5.5 made a come back in that dimension.
It’s probably more efficient caching methods and smaller models (6 sol is actually 6 terra and opus 5.5 is smaller than 5.1 etc). Don’t overthink this please
The conditions for DeepSeek's profitability are very very narrow. A key piece being that they have cheap energy, a second key is that they have west/east clients and thus extremely high uptime.
Not DeepSeek themselves, but their open models are run by third-party companies in a profitable way. The unsustainable interference theory has been debunked.
Define profit? If by profit you mean covering compute costs then yes you're correct. If by profit you mean covering spent RnD budget and future RnD budget allocations then no, by no means are any of these AI companies running at a profit.
Also these third-party providers are running magnitude smaller models than what Anthropic and OpenAI's power users expect from them. Yes the average chat message isn't being routed to the 1+ Trillion param model but people running CC or Codex on Ultra probably are. Those are objectively more expensive.
I fully expect token vendors to go the way of mobile data providers. Increasing throughput and efficiency, yet commoditized and not reaping the massive rewards of the economic gains their technologies enable.
Can't wait for the unlimited plans we will have in due time.
"Unlimited" for a consumer will probably take a form like limited parallel agents at max intelligence for X amount of tokens, followed by either single threaded agents or nerfed intelligence or both.
This is the same mechanism used in unlimited mobile internet for example.
> Can't wait for the unlimited plans we will have in due time.
I don't see how this can happen. The cost of serving a model grows linearly with use (energy). The cost of serving a mobile data plan is approximately zero.
I'm curious, why would this not turn into an unlimited electricity flatrate? In most parts of the world, consumer electricity is charged by kWh, not as flat payment.
As long as tokens are as energy intense to compute as they are right now, I don't see a flatrate being a viable model.
Something close to how we rent other cloud resources today makes sense. We don't worry about electricity costs, it's built into the hourly prices, use as much of the hardware as you can. Electricity rates vary over the course of the day as well.
People don't like complex pricing. This would be for businesses running larger workloads. For individuals, the unlimited plan seems the most probable to me. This stuff is going to get real cheap in the coming years.
The energy needed per token is in dropping rapidly, even though the energy per-GPU is going up. We are seeing something like 10x improvements per year.
Price war. Duh. There is no moat. Also them chinese competition. It’s going to be race to the bottom. It’s gonna be ugly for the stock market. Good for consumers though!
Doubt the race to the bottom is really good for consumers, unless you actually just want more stuff rather than better stuff. The bubble bursting is going to be pretty horrible financially for us all.
The main thing it seems to have done so far is made everything feel less trustworthy, and everything digital less safe. It has empowered scammers, that's for sure.
And for what benefit? Spunking out 7/10 code a bit faster with your brain turned off. Great!
That would likely require innovation in a renewable liquid fuel that can work at scale.
Electrification will drive the demand for oil down, making the overhead more expensive per gallon, and eventually we will largely move off of fossil fuels, though I don't expect completely. It will be many decades due to the turnover times for industrial/commercial transportation systems.
I do not expect an outright ban. (1) the bots are too useful, open is the way, re: HF handling the incident (2) you can train without certain capabilities, see Kimi K3.1 (3) reminiscent of the encryption is dangerous debate of the '90s
There will likely be requirements like registering with the government (China already does this, every business already does everywhere), certain usages require more or have deeper regulations (this is already done with most technologies, depending on application)
I think it will not technically be a ban, but a de facto one.
Some variation on, "Open weight models must be A) trained in the USA B) have a public training dataset + training pipeline C) be reviewed by a government 'safety council', etc" Something which technically leaves a crack open for someone to release a less capable model than the commercial ones.
That kind of policy will hold a country back, and why I don't think it will happen. There are already many companies already using Chinese models.
Another confounding factor, if a US company fine-tunes a Chinese model, or vice versa, what is that country that should be assigned to that model.
You also have to consider the competition between the US and China. If the US did something like this, the world will move to Chinese hardware and Ai. The think tanks that talk with legislators understand this.
You have more faith than I do. It would be bad policy, but hardly a first for a government who wielded tariffs like a cudgel in spite of obvious repercussions.
There are people in Trump's inner most circle that know this. I'm not worried about it. People trust those calling for regulatory capture (Dario / Altman) the least. (HN is not a good representation of the general population and AI userbase)
> It turned out that GPT-6 Sol was a dud performancewise, so a week later OpenAI announced GPT-6.1 Sol,
I strongly believe that GPT-6 Sol was only ever meant to be the web chat model, but it was a panic public release to respond to Opus 5.5. It's clearly been over fitted for drawing diagrams in the chat.
Whether you think they have a future or not does not change fact that they currently are wildly unprofitable.
>internet thing wasn’t going anywhere.
This is conflating the utility of the technology with the economics behind it. Few people claim LLMs are useless. It's a question of figuring out a viable business model.
The US absolutely could (and very well might) make Chinese models illegal, possibly open weight models in general, but all that will do is keep them out of the hands of law abiding US citizens.
Law breakers in the US and the entire rest of the world would still have access, and nothing in the US will be any safer. People who think regulation will solve the problem should be embarrassed by their ignorance.
However, capability could plateau or reach a point where most of the market can't tell the difference and isn't willing to pay a premium.
Kimi K3.1 is top 5 on AA and half the price of Opus 5.5, Qwen4 is coming soon. There is near zero difference for most tasks, so it matters less today and even less as time goes on. Price is now the top concern for a reason.
https://artificialanalysis.ai/#intelligence
You and I obviously can just use a VPN, but 99% of usage is likely as part of a company.
Is there precedent for the US actually "banning" software? I know for example the Kaspersky ban and tiktok ban, but both of those were either banning the sales or banning the service. IIRC neither made the actual software illegal.
What is an example of a specific software being illegal to possess? What is an example of a specific software being illegal to use if it is not used to break other laws (copyright, etc.) or talks to banned service providers?
Closest thing I can think of is restricting the export of cryptography in the 90's, but that was not even close to what you are suggesting.
And I’m slowly writing my own. But it’s garbage at the moment.
At home, I mostly use openrouter.
A few bucks will realistically last you forever. I also bought a DGX Spark at launch. I've learned a ton. but it's not usually my daily driver. I do run overnight tasks on it, like "read this book and write up notes on each chapter..."
In retrospect, given the dirt cheap prices of apis and or renting hardware, buying hardware for inference was likely a mistake (but not enough of a mistake to sell it now).
Regulation might inconvenience them a little, but the upside is huge if it means open models out of China get banned.
Yet, so many Democrats support it.
You can as long as you can saturate hardware with profit that makes up for training costs (which are also in free fall).
Anthropic is most at risk since they haven't bought any hardware (afaik), however OpenAi is building custom silicon now. The rest of Mag7 are primarily hardware vendors
https://mimo.xiaomi.com/rl/
Also look to the history of stable diffusion
There was an interesting technical advantage by some models where Anthropic as a leader start loosing dramatically in speed too. 5.5 made a come back in that dimension.
Also these third-party providers are running magnitude smaller models than what Anthropic and OpenAI's power users expect from them. Yes the average chat message isn't being routed to the 1+ Trillion param model but people running CC or Codex on Ultra probably are. Those are objectively more expensive.
Can't wait for the unlimited plans we will have in due time.
But if you get unlimited tokens, with scheduled/automated jobs and subagents you will burn a LOT of money.
This is the same mechanism used in unlimited mobile internet for example.
Maybe, maybe not. There could be a saturation point of compute demand from ordinary consumers. (See: hot-water analogy.)
I expect they will be "unlimited" in the same sense the mobile / ISPs do that 99% of people never reach the limits.
We could have "unlimited" electricity too, if we choose, by printing solar panels (like the Chinese) and hopefully fusion before long.
Tell that to my dial up modem as I played Active Worlds in 1996.
I don't see how this can happen. The cost of serving a model grows linearly with use (energy). The cost of serving a mobile data plan is approximately zero.
The cost of processing tokens however does not. Throughput and efficiency are improving around 10x per year. Hardware is not the only factor.
As long as tokens are as energy intense to compute as they are right now, I don't see a flatrate being a viable model.
People don't like complex pricing. This would be for businesses running larger workloads. For individuals, the unlimited plan seems the most probable to me. This stuff is going to get real cheap in the coming years.
The energy needed per token is in dropping rapidly, even though the energy per-GPU is going up. We are seeing something like 10x improvements per year.
The main thing it seems to have done so far is made everything feel less trustworthy, and everything digital less safe. It has empowered scammers, that's for sure.
And for what benefit? Spunking out 7/10 code a bit faster with your brain turned off. Great!
Electrification will drive the demand for oil down, making the overhead more expensive per gallon, and eventually we will largely move off of fossil fuels, though I don't expect completely. It will be many decades due to the turnover times for industrial/commercial transportation systems.
There will likely be requirements like registering with the government (China already does this, every business already does everywhere), certain usages require more or have deeper regulations (this is already done with most technologies, depending on application)
Some variation on, "Open weight models must be A) trained in the USA B) have a public training dataset + training pipeline C) be reviewed by a government 'safety council', etc" Something which technically leaves a crack open for someone to release a less capable model than the commercial ones.
Another confounding factor, if a US company fine-tunes a Chinese model, or vice versa, what is that country that should be assigned to that model.
You also have to consider the competition between the US and China. If the US did something like this, the world will move to Chinese hardware and Ai. The think tanks that talk with legislators understand this.
I strongly believe that GPT-6 Sol was only ever meant to be the web chat model, but it was a panic public release to respond to Opus 5.5. It's clearly been over fitted for drawing diagrams in the chat.
They know what they’re doing. The naysayers are like the people that said this little internet thing wasn’t going anywhere.
>internet thing wasn’t going anywhere.
This is conflating the utility of the technology with the economics behind it. Few people claim LLMs are useless. It's a question of figuring out a viable business model.
Commercial airlines are of great value to our lives. Who's questioning or denying that?
Horrible business to be in though.
One thing that naysayers have going on for them is the fact that those companies indeed aren't making profit right now.
Crazy how delusional people are.
They are in too deep - they have to believe it all works out and act accordingly. lmao.