it's now 2025, and from china, we have deepseek, qwen, kimi, glm, ernie and many more capable models keeping up with western labs. there are actually now more chinese labs releasing sota models than western labs.
They are lauded for the ability to cost ratio, or their ability to parameter ratio, but virtually everyone using LLMs for productive work are using ChatGPT/Gemini/Claude.
They are kind of like Huffy bicycles. Good value, work well, but if you go to any serious event, no one will be riding one.
they are keeping up. i have been using just chinese models for the last 2 years. chatgpt/gemini/claude have marketing. there's nothing that you can do with those models that can't be done with deepseek, glm or kimi. if there is, do let us know.
The downside of their efficiency and cost-ratio is that they undermine the circular economy of massive data centers, GPU sales, and VC money that is constructing an extremely wasteful bubble.
Have you tried using those models? qwen for example cant even do something as basic as clustering analysis on a list of integers, hell it goes off the rails when just reading said integers from a file - starts babbling about determining number of digits, indexes, tries concatenating numbers together into one big string, no idea wtf is going on with that model.
while qwen, deepseek and kimi are opensourced and good, they are preferred because of their insane token ratio, they use a lot less for more, but a by product is that they are less accurate
it is amazing progress by the chinese companies, but they definitely can improve a lot more
too early to call a winner, though it is disappointing to see US withdrawal from open source. Still the main outcome of open source is distribution / diffusion of the idea, so it will inevitably mean US open source will come back, hopefully via some grass roots maniac, there will be a Linus-like character emerge at some point
i'm not calling a winner, i'm just saying that the chinese have caught up despite the embargo. google, openai & anthrophic have phenomenal models. i stopped using openai & anthropic after they called for open weight/source regulation. i use google because they offer gemma and i got a year gemini-pro subscription for free, use openai gpt-oss-120b since i can run it at home, and the only model i currently pay for is a chinese model.
go to 2024, western labs were crushing it.
it's now 2025, and from china, we have deepseek, qwen, kimi, glm, ernie and many more capable models keeping up with western labs. there are actually now more chinese labs releasing sota models than western labs.