alt Hacker NewsIt's all about the hardware and infrastructure. If you check OpenRouter, no provider offers a SOTA chinese model matching the speed of Claude, GPT or Gemini. The chinese models may benchmark close on paper, but real-world deployment is different. So you either buy your own hardware in order to run a chinese model at 150-200tps or give up an use one of the Big 3.
The US labs aren't just selling models, they're selling globally distributed, low-latency infrastructure at massive scale. That's what justifies the valuation gap.
Edit: It looks like Cerebras is offering a very fast GLM 4.6
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Gemini 3 = ~70tps https://openrouter.ai/google/gemini-3-pro-preview
Opus 4.5 = ~60-80tps https://openrouter.ai/anthropic/claude-opus-4.5
Kimi-k2-think = ~60-180tps https://openrouter.ai/moonshotai/kimi-k2-thinking
Deepseek-v3.2 = ~30-110tps (only 2 providers rn) https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v3.2
> If you check OpenRouter, no provider offers a SOTA chinese model matching the speed of Claude, GPT or Gemini.
I think GLM 4.6 offered by Cerebras is much faster than any US model.
Assuming your hardware premise is right (and lets be honest, nobody really wants to send their data to chinese providers) You can use a provider like Cerebras, Groq?
cerebras AI offers models at 50x the speed of sonnet?
According to OpenRouter, z.ai is 50% faster than Anthropic; which matches my experience. z.ai does have frequent downtimes but so does Claude.
The network effects of using consistently behaving models and maintaining API coverage between updates is valuable, too - presumably the big labs are including their own domains of competence in the training, so Claude is likely to remain being very good at coding, and behave in similar ways, informed and constrained by their prompt frameworks, so that interactions will continue to work in predictable ways even after major new releases occur, and upgrades can be clean.
It'll probably be a few years before all that stuff becomes as smooth as people need, but OAI and Anthropic are already doing a good job on that front.
Each new Chinese model requires a lot of testing and bespoke conformance to every task you want to use it for. There's a lot of activity and shared prompt engineering, and some really competent people doing things out in the open, but it's generally going to take a lot more expert work getting the new Chinese models up to snuff than working with the big US labs. Their product and testing teams do a lot of valuable work.