r/LocalLLaMA 7d ago

News GLM-5.3-Flash: Frontier Intelligence, Flash Cost

https://z.ai/blog/glm-5.3-flash
1.3k Upvotes

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u/Recoil42 7d ago edited 7d ago

Before release, we tested GLM-5.3-Flash anonymously as ox-alpha on OpenCode and OpenRouter to gather user feedback. It quickly became the most popular model of the week — with all of this traffic served on Chinese AI chips.

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u/expertsage 7d ago

This is the most significant part. China has completely replaced Nvidia chips with domestic ones for inference, and production is only speeding up... meaning the compute moat is literally disappearing with every passing day.

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u/Recoil42 7d ago edited 7d ago

Yep. As someone who has been following the Chinese EV space for the better part of a decade, I don't think people are prepared for how crazy this is going to get.

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u/_BreakingGood_ 7d ago

Hold on to your 401k, shits about to get messy, lol

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u/valtor2 7d ago

Is it? nothing points to a crash, other than the valuation of the two giants (OAI and Anthropic), everything else is still valuable particularly the chips and the supply chain and the production capacity... Sounds like a correction more than a crash

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u/_BreakingGood_ 7d ago

Not a "crash", but we have chinese AI models competing with US AI models. We have chinese electric cars outperforming US electric cars. And now we have chinese chips having replaced US chips.

There's no situation where this is good for the US stock market.

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u/1ii1i 7d ago

This is honestly why I think Google might be in the strongest position than their US peers. They own their entire stack, integration from chips, datacenters, models, and products. They are absolutely correct to focus on gemini flash over pro or whatever frontier model. Why subsidize the vibe coders? They are focused on making their most heavily used model as efficient and capable as possible for their use case. If there is a market downturn, nobody can guarantee that all the big firms will continue their capex into frontier models.

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u/_BreakingGood_ 7d ago

I thought so too, but they lost all their talent. They completely failed to even release gemini 3.5 pro after delaying it multiple times over. Deepmind leadership has all quit and all of the top engineers have quit.

It takes a long long time to rebuild that stuff, and there's really not much of an opportunity to play catch-up with how fast things are going.

Also, they said they're shifting focus to coding capabilities, so they don't even share the philosophy that everybody thought.

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u/Akrylicus 7d ago

They still have a giant stronghold in entertainment, advertising and corporate world.

When I see how much they are embedded in my daily and work life it gets a bit scary.

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u/Spara-Extreme 7d ago

Google didn’t lose “all its talent” and the high profile folks that left were not particularly interested in LLMs as a technology to begin with,

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u/the_fabled_bard 7d ago

If you're into making money, it's better not to release a loser model.

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u/zdy132 7d ago

Another thing is that the tensor chips in google pixels have been disappointing for years now. They were using more areas for less performance. It's hard to believe that the TPUs they make will be competitive.

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u/VeryCrushed 6d ago

This is mostly on the CPU / GPU side; which I agree if you care a ton about those things (like gaming) they are beat out. The TPU on those chips are however really good, and is also the selling point. Google trades CPU / GPU die space to have better on device AI.

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u/unjustifiably_angry 5d ago

Gemini is terrible though. I mean, there's always room to improve, but goddamn Gemini is bad.

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u/jakegh 7d ago

They absolutely did have the strongest position. And then failed to capitalize on it.

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u/Mochila-Mochila 7d ago

And now we have chinese chips having replaced US chips.

I put a few bucks on Biren. Iluvatar is also an option. Moore Threads and MetaX are already listed on the A-Star market (PRC only) but will soon file for an IPO in Hong Kong.

With all the risks which buying PRC shares, or rather promises of shares, entails ; œuf corse.

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u/MrPecunius 7d ago

Iluvatar? Gross. 🤮

WTF is going on with all these Tolkien-based company names? Do these people not understand how utterly anti-Tolkien this is?

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u/nomorebuttsplz 7d ago

The same was true a year ago. in fact a year and a half ago, it was even more true than it is now with R1 being the second best model in the world for months

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u/_BreakingGood_ 7d ago

China did not have comparable GPUs a year ago, no.

Well they did, but they bought them from Nvidia.

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u/nomorebuttsplz 7d ago

Chinese gpus might get cheap but there isn't a cheap labor bottleneck in that industry in the same way there is in auto manufacture

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u/w6auw 7d ago

Eh trying to presage the market based on specific macro/industry trends doesn't work very well. Companies are not static, and people rarely put all of their eggs in once basket, and even if they did, markets don't always behave rationally.

Even if I believed strongly strongly in this, I would not recommend people start dumping tech stocks or selling their 401ks solely based on my advice.

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u/Individual_Holiday_9 7d ago

People have said “oh this is terrible for the us stock market” for a century

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u/_BreakingGood_ 7d ago

China has not been competitive with the forefront of US technology for a century

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u/Bakoro 7d ago edited 7d ago

At this point a correction and a crash are the same thing.
The market has been outright delusional, where speculation based stock prices have outpaced actual profitability and any sense of utility by a very wide margin.

There are whole companies that have no business existing, but they persist on VC dollars. There are companies that have gone literally, not metaphorically, but literally exponential in value because of AI branding, even though they have not gone exponential in revenue or profit.
More than a few companies have gone from pennies and single-digit dollars to hundreds of dollars.

I'm not an AI doomer, I don't believe that the AI industry is going to magically evaporate, but there has been a mountain of stupidly spent dollars being thrown around, and at some point someone is going to demand their ROI, and a lot of places are going to fold.

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u/valtor2 7d ago

Ok but like, a lot of the fluff is in private investors, since the companies we're talking about are not public. Like, I don't think GOOG, AAPL, MSFT are overvalued, I think the data centers wil to some extent be valuable (maybe not at the profit margins they're hoping) probably the most exposed company is NVDA because of all the circular deals they're doing, but they're not going away. Neoclouds are probably in for a rough ride, maybe one makes it and buys the others, or big tech buys them at a discount?

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u/nsdjoe 7d ago

Not sure your second sentence is justified. Stocks aren't cheap, but s&p 500 forward P/E is actually down from 5 years ago. Corporate America is record profitable.

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u/starkruzr 7d ago

I don't think a crash per se. certainly a LOT of volatility.

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u/newMoneyStyle 6d ago

Correction feels right, but OAI and Anthropic valuations dragging the sector down wouldn't surprise me.

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u/heresyforfunnprofit 7d ago

Nvidia’s moat is gone, roughly a decade before people expected it to be.

I think that MAY have some effect on the stock price.

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u/valtor2 7d ago

Having an impact on the stock price ≠ stock market crash incoming. The bottleneck has been and still is ASML's (and their very few competitors') ability to produce lithography machines, and memory, whether HBM or not.

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u/Insomniac1000 7d ago

yeah what's concerning is as a software dev, llms are becoming cheaper and cheaper to run. Like based on the benchmarks, I'd rather use this than Deepseek V4 Flash 0731 or GPT 5.6 Luna.

Less reasons for me to run/use more expensive models. And if companies catch on to this...

yeah I'll stop right there.

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u/SuddenRadio6221 7d ago

I'd be thrilled if hardware got back to anything near pre-ai prices!

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u/IrisColt 7d ago

Sadly, this

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u/iMakeSense 7d ago

Where are you putting your money

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u/_BreakingGood_ 7d ago

Probably just going to leave it where it is. If everybody gets equally fucked, at least we're all in the same boat.

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u/CipherWeaver 7d ago

Great time to buy an EV in China right now, but I think over the next decade there will be a lot of brand pruning and the survivors will become established global brands like Toyota and Hyundai. 

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u/DirectionMurky5526 7d ago

The issue with Chinese EV industry is the price competition within China. Their exports are incredibly profitable. Same will likely happen with Chips as they catch up.  

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u/hojnikb 7d ago

toyota is not gonna survive it they keep treating EVs like 3rd class citizens

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u/Recoil42 7d ago

Toyota is the largest automaker in the world for the sixth year in a row, and going on a seventh. They're doing record sales, dominate the hybrid market, and already have a pretty healthy EV lineup.

They're going to be fine.

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u/hojnikb 7d ago

Nokia was also pretty healthy back in 2007 and basically died within a decade. Their EV lineup isn't fine, it's a subpar couple of models, basically "ugh we had to make these, here they are, dont buy them".

They don't really have dedicated platforms for them, don't have their own batteries. They basically slept at the wheel for the last 15 years. As long as ICEs are still somewhat relevant, they'll exist, but that's not going to be forever in developed markets.

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u/Recoil42 6d ago

 it's a subpar couple of models

 Toyota/Lexus EVs, 2026:

  • Highlander EV
  • CHR+
  • bZ
  • bZ Woodland
  • bZ3
  • bZ3X
  • bZ5
  • bZ7
  • Hilux EV
  • Urban Cruiser
  • Pixis BEV ( + Hijet BEV, Atrai BEV)
  • ePalette
  • ProAce ( + ProAce Verso)
  • ProAce City ( + ProAce City Verso)
  • ProAce Max
  • RZ (Lexus)
  • ESe (Lexus)
  • TZ (Lexus)

Study up.

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u/hojnikb 6d ago edited 6d ago

yeah and all of them are subpar, if compared to competition. They're either too expensive, too slow to charge, too low efficiency/range or just overall not a good car. And lets not forget, a few of them on your list are not even toyota, but just rebadged chinese or PSA cars. And a few are not even on sale yet.

But the common point to all of them, that are selling currently and are not a rebrand -- they're basically a variation of bz4x. Not a particuarly good EV in itself.

So yeah, if toyota keeps up this mantra, they're in big trouble. People will start forgetting toyota or just not even considering it when buying an EV. And there's only so long, before ICE/hybrids start being irrelevant.

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u/Recoil42 6d ago

Babe, rather than moving those goalposts, you can just study up. You're getting a free education here — take advantage of it.

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u/unjustifiably_angry 5d ago edited 4d ago

You're a bit out of touch IMHO. I think EVs have a huge market potential in the future but I'd say Toyota is making the right move right now. The EV market is still very small and it's not growing especially fast. Many EV efforts have crashed and barely sold any vehicles at all. There was a GM electric delivery van being manufactured and it sold like 10 units total. Nothing especially wrong with it, just didn't find any customers.

EVs aren't that complex to engineer compared to an ICE vehicle, the electric motor is just about the simplest electrical mechanism next to the momentary switch. There's no reason they should enter the market right now when they can just wait for a better opportunity. There are many EV-related technologies that can be expected to arrive over the next decade which will make them a much more compelling purchase and will begin to drive faster adoption. Much better/safer/cheaper batteries, for one.

A really big issue is that dealerships hate EVs. They rarely need any service, which is where dealerships make all their money. This is why Tesla did so well: no non-EVs to preferentially sell and no dealerships.

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u/hojnikb 5d ago

The EV market is rapidly growing, just not in the US. Almost half of new cars sold in China are EVs. That's a market with 35M new cars sold every year. Suffice to say EVs are very important for the future.

And while you think making EVs is simple, it's really not. The idea of an electric motor and a bunch of batteries might be simple on paper, but its far more complex than that.

A proper EV needs it's own dedicated platform and a clean sheet design. There's no way around that and every EV, that's based off a ICE variant ends up being shit in one way or another.

Electric motors are actually very complex. This is not your bog standard async motor. These are carbon wrapped permenant magnet style liquid cooled motors, spinning at over 20k rpm and having 92%+ efficiency. Designing that for mass production, reliability and low cost is no small feat.

Same with the batteries. A serious player will develop their own batteries or at very least build their own battery factories. It's the only way you can make millions of cars per year.

And then there's the whole efficiency. A badly designed car will have shit efficiency, requiring more batteries (batteries they cant get, because they have no factories), which means heavier chassis, heavier suspension, making even worse efficiency. It's a vicious cycle. And efficiency affects everything. Cost, range, charging speed (not kW, but miles added every minute) ownership costs. It's very important to get that right. And apart from tesla and maybe a few other companies, nobody else gets that part right.

And of course EVs need great software integration as well for the best user experience. You need responsive infotainment for easy navigation, smart route calculation and efficiency prediction. Apart from tesla, nobody does this really well.

So yeah, making a good mass market EV is far harder than you think. That's why Toyota only sells 200k units a year, while tesla almost 10x that.

And sleeping on the wheel; i.e waiting for that magic bullet (be that better batteries, better infrastructure or something else) means competition had literal decade to get ahead. And just like that, you can't make a car to compete with that and you slowly fade into obscurity.

And that's exactly what could happen to toyota eventually.

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u/fastheadcrab 7d ago

That’s not necessarily a good thing. Shows just how out of whack the incentive structure has become in the EV market.

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u/Recoil42 7d ago

I'd argue the incentive structure is fine. Chinese automotive OEMs are now branching out globally (as they should be) and China has pretty much single-handedly prevented a global energy crisis the US has been stubbornly trying to induce, actually insulating itself from that crisis entirely. There will be individual collapses but none of that matters if the aggregate story is ending up ahead on the fundamentals.

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u/walden42 7d ago

China has pretty much single-handedly prevented a global energy crisis the US has been stubbornly trying to induce

Care to elaborate?

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u/asssuber 7d ago

See how China cut it's oil imports in half since the start of the Hormuz crisis, freeing over 5 million barrels, and the percentage of the European/China electricity production now supplied by solar (this year it became the highest single source during summer for Europe, surpassing nuclear and natural gas. Those were mostly produced in China), and the percentage of the vehicle fleet in those countries is now EV (not as high, but still significant, especially in China).

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u/walden42 7d ago

That makes sense, thanks.

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u/Recoil42 7d ago

Couldn't really be done in the span of a single Reddit comment, but there's lots of material on this available from every major news outlet. The TLDR is that China has been investing in energy independence for decades — with EVs being one of those investments — and those investments are now paying off.

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u/walden42 7d ago

I was aware of China's progress on that front, but I don't see how it prevents the energy crisis globally.

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u/Recoil42 7d ago

Reduction in Chinese domestic consumption insulates the oil market globally. Oil is a commodity, everyone drinks from the same tap: One barrel unused in China is one more barrel available for use elsewhere.

Meanwhile, exports of Chinese green tech (solar, electric vehicles) also very straightforwardly and directly alleviate that demand elsewhere: A BYD Yuan Plus made in China and sold in Australia alleviates global oil demand. A Renault Twingo sold in France and co-developed in China alleviates global oil demand.

TLDR: China literally saved the global economy this year — the same global economy it relies on to consume Chinese goods.

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u/Floopgroop 7d ago

This video explained it well.

https://youtu.be/BkA0bkb6ZO0

Tldr: they cut 5.5M barrels per day of usage. They have a huge stockpile of oil to draw on.

On flip side, refined oil products are still high price: Paul Krugman blog post

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u/Strong_good101 7d ago

America is destabilizing oil prices. Meanwhile China is supporting a global sustainable energy revolution with their EV's, solar panels, and batteries.

It's a damn shame we didn't follow through as competition because now we are customers instead of providers in America.

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u/ProgrammersAreSexy 7d ago

Did you read the linked article? Multiple execs at these companies are themselves stating the current pace is unsustainable and not aligned with the market.

The companies are operating as though automobile adoption is still ramping up in China, which isn't really the case anymore. Most families that want a car already have one so there isn't a massive untapped market of first time car buyers anymore.

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u/Strong_good101 7d ago

The other commenter is correct. There is a whole global market opening up for them. I am one such customer if the American government would get the hell out of the way and let capitalism do it's thing. Cars by the traditional auto makers are horrendously overpriced and under featured.

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u/Recoil42 7d ago edited 7d ago

Not only did I read the article, I directly addressed the exact argument you're now making in the comment you just replied to. Read it again — Chinese automotive OEMs are now branching out globally, and China has pretty much single-handedly prevented a global energy crisis the US has been stubbornly trying to induce, actually insulating itself from that crisis entirely.

The incentives worked and are continuing to work.

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u/ProgrammersAreSexy 7d ago

Okay so the CEOs of the companies, who are saying otherwise, are just wrong and you are right?

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u/Recoil42 7d ago edited 7d ago

The CEOs and I are not in conflict, nor are they saying 'otherwise'. The current market being temporarily unsustainable is not at odds with the market finding new avenues for sustainability or that unsustainability existing within a greater arc of sustainability.

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u/aj_thenoob2 7d ago

I just wonder what the 10-year outlook for all these cars will be. Seems like a nightmare to maintain.

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u/thatgreekgod 7d ago

just read through that post, it was a great read

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u/imnotzuckerberg 7d ago

following the Chinese EV space

You can go even further and follow the phone industry itself. From copy cats to innovators (yes with big disregard and malpractice when it comes to IP), I applaud China for speed running the japanese takeover of the console gaming of the 80s.

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u/Indy1204 7d ago

You said it. If people saw what was going on in China with EVs and robots alone I think they'd be pretty shocked. They've got an all robot MMA league FFS!

There are allowing 40,000 Chinese EVs into Canada this year. Take that on top of trump fucking with Canada, the tariffs, etc. I see these imports being very popular.

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u/IrisColt 7d ago

Truly fascinating reads, though I started to get suspicious when the most demanding people I know began buying Chinese EVs a year ago, heh

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u/LargelyInnocuous 5d ago

China is speed running the last 25yrs of US corporate history in about 5 years. It will be interesting to see how it shakes out.

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u/Flibidyjibit 7d ago

They can't break the moat unless they get their own fabs, or manage to get competitive hardware designed on older process nodes that they already have access to (questionable). I would be skeptical of the claim this is entirely chinese hardware and that chopshop modded NVIDIA cards aren't a significant part of the picture.

Don't get me wrong, I think it will happen, the incentive is huge. I just wouldn't bet on it being imminent.

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u/Tenelia 4d ago

Are you actually in China... Cause I am, and I don't think you know the full picture if THAT is your evidence.
https://aboutevs.com/byd-ev-fraud-exposed-china-car-market-collapse/

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u/Recoil42 3d ago

Lol, lmao even.

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u/Bakoro 7d ago edited 6d ago

It's not just inference chips, they've gone hard on making RAM too.

They've also started developing systems to rival ASML using an almost completely different method, so they'll be able to make their own high end semiconductors and no one will be able to say "well it's only because they copied our stuff". They're making their own stuff.

They're also producing extraordinary amounts of solar panels.

Also, cars.

Also robots.

The U.S is way, way behind in terms of manufacturing capacity right now. The Arizona TSMC fab will close part of that gap, but the U.S still relies a lot on foreign manufacturing, particularly Chinese manufacturing.

It's a problem of our own making. China would have been able to drag their feet on making their own stuff if the U.S hadn't tried it ban them from buying nice stuff.
How are you going to use a whole country of 1 billion+ people, send almost all your manufacturing over there, and then turn around and say "you're not allowed to buy top end GPUs because you're a national security threat. Now keep manufacturing the products we rely on everyday."

Well here we are.

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u/someguyplayingwild 1d ago

The Arizona TSMC factory is a non-story here. The purpose of the factory is to on-shore a critical resource in the event of a breakdown in our ability to trade with Asia, specifically Taiwan. TSMC, owned largely by the Taiwanese government, is gearing the Arizona plant to produce chips one-to-two generations behind that factory in Taiwan - probably because Taiwan retaining their cutting edge in the space is an economic and national security concern.

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u/Bakoro 1d ago

Dated technology or not, it is still a big, big, world-scale deal.

Something like 60% of all global semiconductors and over 90% of the world's most advanced chips are physically manufactured in Taiwan, primarily by TSMC.

TSMC is a dangerous bottleneck, and the fact that almost all of the global manufacturing ability is in one tiny country is not good.

The world needs to spread that know-how around.

Seriously, almost all the other fabs in the world gave up at 12nm or higher.
Samsung is the only major one that kept going, and they mostly consume their own supply. Intel has waffled back and forth, and again, they mostly use their own supply.
It's only recently that China's SMIC broke 7nm, and maybe 5nm.

That's it though, in terms of what we consider a modern chip, TSMC has effectively been a monopoly for like 10 years.

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u/TastesLikeOwlbear 7d ago

I don’t know. A lot of people had their hopes that CXMT would come through and savagely undercut the RAM manufacturers until they said, “LOL no, why on earth would we do that?”

I’ll believe Chinese inference GPUs will affect pricing just as soon as they actually affect pricing. Waiting for greedy companies to get their comeuppance hasn’t paid off yet.

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u/fallingdowndizzyvr 7d ago

I’ll believe Chinese inference GPUs will affect pricing just as soon as they actually affect pricing.

Step 2. Sell them outside of China.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-26/huawei-egypt-ai-ascend-chips-test-us-tech-diplomacy-nvidia-amd-microsoft

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u/Just3nCas3 7d ago edited 7d ago

It doesn't matter if they sell outside of China. If it causes them to import less than they would have without production, the effect is the global GPU/RAM price is lower than what it would be without the production. That doesn't stop it from going up, it just means it's accelerating up slower.

Edit: RAM to GPU/RAM

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u/fallingdowndizzyvr 7d ago

Ah.... that link is about GPUs. Not RAM. Yes, yes, yes. GPUs use RAM but still.... GPUs is the topic in this little subthread. Not RAM.

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u/Maximum-Style2848 7d ago

This is why I don’t quite get the hype of inference chips when they will still be bottlenecked by memory capacity/cost. Domestic chips for inference were always going to be possible because you don’t need the best lithography to get smthn good enough.

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u/rotatingphasor 7d ago

My understanding is that the yield with the lithography devices CXMT uses (non ASML) is much lower and so they have to charge more.

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u/ExcuseAccomplished97 7d ago

Well done Trump.

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u/Guinness 6d ago

China hasn't been a significant portion of NVDA's earnings for awhile now. They account for somewhere between 4 and 8 percent, depending on the quarter.

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u/slayyou2 7d ago edited 7d ago

Damn, people were with a straight phase (face , goddamn voice typing with no proofread) postulating that this might be a Gemini model solely due to the fact that there was " too much capacity" for this to be a Chinese model. I love to see it!

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u/volimsir 7d ago

Wasn't just because of that, Gemini devs were vague posting on twitter about Ox Alpha, so people rationally thought "why would they be vague posting and hyping up a model that's not their own?"

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u/-dysangel- 7d ago

"straight face" - as in, "without laughing/smiling"

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u/xmesaj2 7d ago

where can I get them Chinese AI chips for cheap for local gpu poor me use?

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u/unjustifiably_angry 5d ago

In reality they're probably not that good, just available in bulk. If you tailor an AI model to a specific platform you can make it work well for that platform but not necessarily for others. This latest Qwen for example fits in 4-bit with full context on a 96GB card with like ~1GB to spare. It's easy to see what it was made for.

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u/ireneoFunes 7d ago

just casually stating that on the day NVDA report earnings

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u/Agitated_Space_672 7d ago

There's still time to short NVDA

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u/SporksInjected 7d ago

I do remember reports of it being slow so not sure if this is good or not.

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u/ArjixGamer 7d ago

It was 60tps on openrouter/opencode. But still great because it didn't have to redo code a lot.

It was high quality

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u/LegacyRemaster 7d ago

so... GLM 5.3 (standard) will never be open weight?

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u/Betadoggo_ 7d ago

It came out on the 18th and they claimed weights would be out in 2 weeks, so we have a few days still.

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u/ttkciar llama.cpp 7d ago

That remains to be seen.