[chillfox]

That makes some sense.

I mean, I am going to use the best I can afford. And at work that's Opus, but while work is happy to let me spend $50+/day, that's just not viable for personal hobby use, I need to keep that in the realm of a WOW/mmo subscription.

[827a]

Yup; its not just that people want the best models, so they use Opus or GPT-5.5. Its also that we're talking about nationalized chinese companies. Western corporations are not en masse forming business relationships with Chinese firms and subjecting their proprietary code to whatever harness they cook up just to save a million dollars. Its not happening. And that's why the Chinese labs are failing; they're struggling to build a domestic market for token consumption. The Chinese domestic market sucks for almost everything China builds, they need export partners like the US to keep most of their factories on, but in the case of AI: no one overseas is buying.