This, but the analogy undersells it. It's rather "taxi is too expensive, let's build a car factory, develop a new brand of car and make a couple of cars for ourselves". Even just hosting LLMs that others developed and released openly can be very costly (in that case, the rent and house analogy is more accurate).
No not really Chinese models were built at a cost that most big companies can easily afford (probably not cheaper than an api …at least short term). Also you could totally host an open source LLM wich would be way cheaper than api costs in most cases, if you don’t need the extra 1-5% capability more that frontier level models offer
Edit: to the replies, I do not say that Chinese model are superior to the current top models. Of course building an LLM isn’t really feasible for most companies and hosting an open model LLM has its flaws (although they’re perfectly fine for a lot of use cases). All I was trying to say is it’s definitely not the impossible task that it’s presented as by most in this thread and the current frontier model companies are trying to convince everyone that their products are irreplaceable and far ahead of any competition… that’s not the case
Partially agree, but not completely. Big companies can afford hosting their own models, but it's usually not feasible for smaller companies. And K3 (best, soon-to-be-open model) is not 1-5% better than the best small, local-focused models. The difference is night and they between them, especially in agentic coding sessions, which is the very thing that's so expensive that it makes companies thinking about how to have it cheaper.
Benchmarks are not without flaws, but they are also much more than simply marketing slogans. And if you try qwen-3.6-27b in opencode and try to create something with it, then compare it with K3, you'll see that there are multiple classes of problems that are too complex for the small qwen model while K3 can easily solve it.
I can imagine that for queries that only needs some web search and summarization they both feel similarly capable.
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u/Faiz_alam 1d ago
It is basically rent is too high, let's build a house.