One thing you don't mention is the evolving pricing models. Deepseek are the category definers here (offering "nearly as good", but at 1/10 the cost of proprietory models). There is some erosion in this gap, from both ends, but for day to day work, DS-flash is excellent.
What I find interesting is why, and how? Is the Chinese govt subsidising them as it does batteries and EVs, to corner the global market? Or is it a result of the US sanctions making the Chinese companies focus on efficiency as well as functionality - a constraint not faced by the venture funded US model labs?
I expect the frontier, closed labs to compete much more closely here too. I don’t think it’s subsidies, just a much more competitive price point as open models run at much lower margins (especially if Kimi/glm start charging around 30% revenue share too).
I feel like the pressure of serving a billion users is much higher to target efficiency, rather than having less training compute (which does indeed shift you to a different approach to training your models).
My view is the sanctions massively backfired. Creating not only a homegrown model industry, but a homegrown GPU/NPU industry too. The US child have had a hungry, compliant customer, instead it has a vertically integrated competitor with ideological support. Whereas both the US and China can't afford to fall, only the US might be in the space where they can't afford to succeed either
Excellent round up.
One thing you don't mention is the evolving pricing models. Deepseek are the category definers here (offering "nearly as good", but at 1/10 the cost of proprietory models). There is some erosion in this gap, from both ends, but for day to day work, DS-flash is excellent.
What I find interesting is why, and how? Is the Chinese govt subsidising them as it does batteries and EVs, to corner the global market? Or is it a result of the US sanctions making the Chinese companies focus on efficiency as well as functionality - a constraint not faced by the venture funded US model labs?
I expect the frontier, closed labs to compete much more closely here too. I don’t think it’s subsidies, just a much more competitive price point as open models run at much lower margins (especially if Kimi/glm start charging around 30% revenue share too).
I feel like the pressure of serving a billion users is much higher to target efficiency, rather than having less training compute (which does indeed shift you to a different approach to training your models).
My view is the sanctions massively backfired. Creating not only a homegrown model industry, but a homegrown GPU/NPU industry too. The US child have had a hungry, compliant customer, instead it has a vertically integrated competitor with ideological support. Whereas both the US and China can't afford to fall, only the US might be in the space where they can't afford to succeed either
Too soon to tell imo, but yes the leaky enforcement seems like the worst of both worlds.