alt Hacker NewsTwo aspects to consider:
1. Chinese models typically focus on text. US and EU models also bear the cross of handling image, often voice and video. Supporting all those is additional training costs not spent on further reasoning, tying one hand in your back to be more generally useful.
2. The gap seems small, because so many benchmarks get saturated so fast. But towards the top, every 1% increase in benchmarks is significantly better.
On the second point, I worked on a leaderboard that both normalizes scores, and predicts unknown scores to help improve comparisons between models on various criteria: https://metabench.organisons.com/
You can notice that, while Chinese models are quite good, the gap to the top is still significant.
However, the US models are typically much more expensive for inference, and Chinese models do have a niche on the Pareto frontier on cheaper but serviceable models (even though US models also eat up the frontier there).
Replies
1. Have you seen the Qwen offerings? They have great multi-modality, some even SOTA.
Qwen, Hunyuan, and WAN are three of the major competitors in the vision, text-to-image, and image-to-video spaces. They are quite competitive. Right now WAN is only behind Google's Veo in image-to-video rankings on llmarena for example
> video
Most of AI-generated videos we see on social media now are made with Chinese models.
forgive me for bringing politics into it, are chinese LLM more prone to censorship bias than US ones ?
Thanks for sharing that!
The scales are a bit murky here, but if we look at the 'Coding' metric, we see that Kimi K2 outperforms Sonnet 4.5 - that's considered to be the price-perf darling I think even today?
I haven't tried these models, but in general there have been lots of cases where a model performs much worse IRL than the benchmarks would sugges (certain Chinese models and GPT-OSS have been guilty of this in the past)
Nothing you said helps with the issue of valuation. Yes, the US models may be better by a few percentage points, but how can they justify being so costly, both operationally as well as in investment costs? Over the long run, this is a business and you don't make money being the first, you have to be more profitable overall.