Paper AI Tigers
As a result, going off private information, open-model fan Nathan Lambert says “Chinese open models have become a de facto standard among startups in the US”. Among the few Westerners to stick their necks out and admit it is Airbnb (Qwen). Windsurf’s planner is probably GLM; Cursor’s planner may be DeepSeek.
The best Chinese LLMs offer frontier performance on some benchmarks; massive per-token discounts (~3x on input, ~6x on output); the weights . On-prem with fully free ~MIT licence, self-hosting, white-box access, customisation, with zero markup (and in fact zero revenue going to the Chinese companies); with a bit of work you can get much faster token speeds than the closed APIs; less overrefusal (except on CCP talking points); on topics controversial in the West, less nannying. they just added the search agents that make daily use actually worthwhile. They also let you see the real CoT! They’re
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related reading
- What we learned from 1,604 Chinese AI job postingsepoch.ai
- Building Auto Mode for Open Models — Benjamin Andersonbenanderson.work
- The vibes in China’s AI labsflorianbrand.com
- Dario Amodei — On DeepSeek and Export Controlsdarioamodei.com
- Google "We Have No Moat, And Neither Does OpenAI"semianalysis.com
- Open models in perpetual catch-up - by Nathan Lambertinterconnects.ai
- China’s AI Companies Are Going Closed Sourcechinatalk.media
- DeepSeek: The View from Chinachinatalk.media
- Deepseek: The Quiet Giant Leading China’s AI Racechinatalk.media
- Open models in perpetual catch-upinterconnects.ai
- Who’s Afraid of Chinese Models? – Stratechery by Ben Thompsonstratechery.com
- Moonshot is Chinese But Its AI Models Are From Another Planetthealgorithmicbridge.com