2 businesses working to get money from the same customers in the same field is competition. Kellogs is competing with store brand cereal. People are choosing to use these Chinese AI apis because they are good enough for some workflows and cheaper. If they didn't exist, the money would go to the frontier labs. There is no world where this would not be defined as competition.

I find it funny how people don't realize the technical achievements and papers coming out of deepseek or Alibaba. They are making this whole AI thing sustainable and cheap and available to do at home. That's the future. I should be able to run my own harness and model and never bother with openai or anthropic at all.

> China is not competing, it is distilling US models

China are cheating by using data obtained without permission to train their models in an evil commie way!

They should have done what the US did instead and trained models on data obtained without permission in a fair and freedum way!

> Where are the Chinese models that are blowing US ones out of the water?

Kimi2 blows every US model out of the water in any comparison that includes both costs and performance.

Qwen3.6 runs on a single GPU and beats claudes sonnet. In benchmarks and real world tests from humans. Kimi is awesome but most people won't be able to host it themselves.

A lot of people are slowly realizing the moat of 1T closed source models is gone as of the last few weeks. It's going to change the industry. April was a huge month for open models, it'll be curious to see if that continues.

This Mistral submission is another nail in the coffin.

> beats claudes sonnet

Based on benchmarks which don’t mean that much these days.

> models is gone as of the last few weeks.

Yes, that’s exactly what people were saying after every major release for the past year or so. It’s always a couple of weeks away

i run qwen 3.6. you need to drink some settle down juice.

No way it's awesome.

> China is not competing, it is distilling US models.

I think you should check your notes. The likes of Kimi K2 thinking shows up as high as the second best general purpose model currently in existence. It seems they compete just fine.

If you believe "distilling" is all it takes to put together a model at the top of any synthetic benchmark then I wonder what you would have to say about all US models that greatly underperform in comparison and still manage to be used extensively in professional settings.

But your argument is an emotional one and not rarional, isn't it?

> high as the second best general purpose model

According to benchmarks which are gamed to the extreme these days. Trusting them blindly isn’t exactly rational either. They don’t necessarily translate that well to real world tasks

It’s obviously not “distilling” as such but there are reasons why Chinnese models are consistently several months behind OpenAI/Antropic

Theft is quite a slippery slope argument not in your favor in the context of US based LLMs and how/what they were trained on..

Ah yes, like those EUV machines America and China have worked on.