GPT 5.6 Luna is an extremely cheap and still very capable model.

A chinese model being in the same ballpark of capability at half the price sounds believable to me.

In my use, DeepSeek v4 Flash (which replaced the quite excellent MiniMax M3) lags behind GLM 5.2 & Muse Spark 1.2 (let alone Kimi K3). Also, K3 is a much bigger multi-modal model, while Flash is text-only and likely optimised for coding tasks.