People obsess on the high-end (Mythos, Opus, GPT-Pro).
But for most users, the Chinese ecosystem gives them near-frontier performance at the price of the cheapest American models. Just compare Anthropic's cheapest model Haiku. You get 5x greater context window with MiMo V2.5 Pro and performance which is nearly 2x. And it's still somewhat cheaper!
For regular people, this fact is obscured because they tend to use monthly subscriptions. But there is a lot of space here for a cheap monthly subscription plan by a Chinese frontier lab to give folks near-frontier performance and dramatically undercut the big US labs on price. I don't think most people in the West understand the massive cost differential here. And how they are getting fleeced. For the Chinese players, it's a bit like the EV story again. The profits are made abroad.

But for most users, the Chinese ecosystem gives them near-frontier performance at the price of the cheapest American models. Just compare Anthropic's cheapest model Haiku. You get 5x greater context window with MiMo V2.5 Pro and performance which is nearly 2x. And it's still somewhat cheaper!
For regular people, this fact is obscured because they tend to use monthly subscriptions. But there is a lot of space here for a cheap monthly subscription plan by a Chinese frontier lab to give folks near-frontier performance and dramatically undercut the big US labs on price. I don't think most people in the West understand the massive cost differential here. And how they are getting fleeced. For the Chinese players, it's a bit like the EV story again. The profits are made abroad.



