[throwaway894345]

I wonder what are the economics driving these pricing decisions? Are the Chinese companies just subsidizing their models to a greater degree than the US, or is this an emergent property of energy policy between countries?

[comboy]

For one, they invested in infrastructure. They can build fast and efficiently. They can provide power, they can provide cooling. Even if you just make roads better you make everything more efficient. Plus level of standard education. It all compounds.

On HN China is seen as a cheap labor copycat. This used to be a fair approximation at some point in the past. In my opinion China is getting ahead of everyone else much more than US used to be.

SF is a beautiful thing in the US, vast power and wealth comes from there. Smart people collaborating communicating and building fast and with excitement. China did SF kind of thing for many different sectors in many different places.

[Octoth0rpe]

Throwing out another factor: Chinese companies have been banned and/or limited from buying nvidia, and turned to local companies for their hardware. I haven't actually seen pricing/benchmarks comparing Chinese AI accelerators, but it wouldn't surprise me if that also worked out in their favor as well.

[lokar]

And, possibly, state subsidies at every level.

[Schlagbohrer]

I have to point out the massive state subsidies in the united states for the tech companies and datacenter builders.

[throwaway67678]

Lower cost of labor, lots of under the hood optimizations (e.g. cache hits for DS), many of these companies have existing infra (fewer upfront costs for deployment), etc

[ecshafer]

China isn't that cheap for labor. And if you think the guys in Z.ai or xiaoxiao aren't the exact same guys from Tsinghua, Peking, MIT, Stanford, CMU, etc. and pulling in amazing salaries you'd be wrong.

[throwaway67678]

I'd assume there's more to the cost of labor than the salaries of the elite folks who do the R&D, but fair point

[nmfisher]

Z.ai was actually a spin-off from Tsinghua (THUDM) AFAIK.

[nl]

Their models are much smaller: 1T vs 5T for the frontier models. 1T is Sonnet/Google Flash size, not Opus size.

The $0.87/M tokens price for Mimo Pro is probably subsidized.

Mimo models aren't widely available on western providers, but Kimi and Deepseek are similar sizes and cost about the same to run. They are priced $3-$4/M tokens (which is right were Google's very confused range of Flash models are priced at: between $0.40/M tokens and $9/M tokens depending on exactly which model - and you don't want the $9 one!).

Anthropic overprices Sonnet (probably because of their capacity issues). GPT 5.4 mini is $4.50/M tokens.

https://docs.fireworks.ai/serverless/pricing

https://www.together.ai/pricing

[Cakez0r]

I'm not sure about those parameter sizing claims. Regardless of parameter size, benchmarked intelligence of Chinese and Western frontier models is comparable, so who cares how many parameters it takes to get there.

Mimo is also widely available on western providers. It's on openrouter and you can sign up with Xiaomi directly for a token plan on an English website priced in dollars.

[rstuart4133]

The Chinese economics: possibly the USA's experience.

It was pretty clear the USA won World War 2 because it out produced and out innovated everyone else. Probably with that in mind, after World War 2 the USA adopted the "Vannevar Bush" model, summarised in this picture: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/annevar-Bushs-Science-th... The idea is to jump start R&D through public funding. The hoped for outcome was that R&D feed private enterprise, leading to a productivity boom.

The boom happened, and the USA did seem to out-compete everybody else in R&D, science, and the products they delivered for decades after that.

That way of doing things seems to have faded over time in the USA. The decline seemed to coincide with the rise of Neo-econmics, and now of course it's been obliterated by Trump. He's very keen to fund Intel to produce chips in a year or two's time (which is something the stock market and banks do perfectly well), but funding basic science is getting drastic cuts.

Still other countries noticed the rise of the USA, and some adopted similar funding models for basic R&D. China seems to have picked it up with gusto, both subsidising R&D and STEM training, leading to huge numbers of engineers and scientists. Whether it will lead to an economic boom remains unknown, but acceleration of ideas and innovations coming out of China seems undeniable. More recently, Ukraine showered its local engineering garages with funds in the hopes of getting a similar outcome to the USA in WW2. It looks like it worked. If the Iran war continues, it's entirely possible arms trade will reverse: the USA could well start buying drones off Ukraine.

[orphea]

Maybe not being led by a sociopath also helps.

[throwaway894345]

I'm pretty sure Xi is also a sociopath, but he differs from Trump in that he's competent. And maybe that's a good thing for American democracy--if we had a competent dictator who could manifest massive infrastructure projects maybe the pro-democracy backlash would be significantly attenuated?

[orphea]

Oh, I was thinking of OpenAI and Anthropic CEOs.

[throwaway894345]

Heh, isn’t it fun living in a timeline where there are so many sociopathic leaders that your earlier comment is ambiguous? (: