alt Hacker News> For coding often quality at the margin is crucial even at a premium
That's a cryptic way to say "Only for vibe-coding quality at the margin matters". Obviously, quality is determined first and foremost by the skills of the human operating the LLM.
> No one really believes at face value a Chinese hosted firm isn’t mass trolling every competitive advantage possible
That's much easier to believe than the same but applied to a huge global corp that operates in your own market and has both the power and the desire to eat your market share for breakfast, before the markets open, so "growth" can be reported the same day.
Besides, open models are hosted by many small providers in the US too, you don't have to use foreign providers per se.
1) model provider choices don’t obviate the need to make other good choices
2) I think there is a special case for Chinese providers due to the philosophical differences in what constitutes fair markets and the regulatory and civil legal structure outside China generally makes such things existentially dangerous to do; hence while it might happen it is extraordinarily ill advised, while in China is implicitly the way things work. However my point is Ali has their own hosted version of Qwen models operating on the frontier that are at minimum hosted exclusively before released. Theres no reason to believe they won’t at some point exclusively host some frontier or fine tuned variants for purposes for commercial reasons. This is part of why they had recent turnover.