> American AI lost the game already, people just can't see it.

Microsoft has been releasing dog shit insanely overpriced software with decent alternatives for decades and is still used in every single company I work for or with.

Your take is the "current year is the year of the linux desktop" meme of "ai"

This ignores two things.

OpenAI and Anthropic have both transitioned into product companies. ChatGPT (the app) and Claude are both one-click installs that just work. People and businesses with pay for this.

People will also pay for the best (or the perception of being the best). Since it's hard to tell what "intelligence" really means model to model, there's a sense of safety in giving a task to the "best".

People dont want iPhone 14s in 2026. People want the latest and greatest. Chinese companies desperately trying to get western usage of their models

From my experience GLM 5.3 is at most 6 months away from the frontier models, and good enough for most tasks already

Even 5.2 is doing really well in comparison here: https://labs.scale.com/leaderboard/sweatlas-refactoring

The usage numbers tell a different story. Not only is the great majority of AI users on American frontier providers, they are also willing to pay the premium price for the premium product. It's not like tech is oblivious to the Chinese models. It's that the industry is aware they are always 6 months to a year behind.

You didn't discover some new trick for cost performance. And the rest of the world isn't dumb.

You're just too broke to afford the supercar and justifying the hooptie. It gets you to the kindergarten class after all. And that's all you need.

Europe didn't even start in the race. Europe is the biggest losers of all it seems. What a shame.

What are they censoring that matters to programmers?

Does AI-style writing start bleeding into the comments, or is HN now also full of bots like reddit?

What harness are you using with those?