[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.