[ignoramous]

> Note the big cut in token prices from China.

After the recent 75%+ price cuts by DeepSeek & Xiaomi MiMo (and now, MiniMax), I pretty much packed my Claude bag up and moved over. I see no discernable difference (other than chattiness of its thinking modes) in capabilities for the kind of coding & debugging work I do.

[1over137]

and China is not threatening to invade the EU or Canada. They are the lesser of two evils at this point.

[ElProlactin]

> and China is not threatening to invade the EU or Canada. They are the lesser of two evils at this point.

They don't need to. They can undermine the West economically and politically.

The US has been a much more violent imperial power but America's wars don't even scratch the surface of what it has done overseas through economic might and covert action.

[js8]

You don't know what you're talking about. Russians occupied my country, killed almost no one, and yet it was far worse than all the economic damage caused by Western neoliberalism.

US imperialism has been a blight to the world, outright killing millions. Modern China did nothing on that scale.

[ElProlactin]

I think you misread my comment.

> ...but America's wars don't even scratch the surface of what it has done overseas through economic might and covert action.

"What IT has done overseas" refers to the US.

But as for China, the Great Leap Forward is considered the largest man-made famine in history, causing somewhere between 15 and 55 million deaths. The Cultural Revolution resulted in the destruction of irreplicable artifacts and historical sites.

Like the US, China has been involved in sowing discord and destruction in other countries. What the US did in Cambodia was an absolute travesty. But China was Pol Pot's primary backer, having provided around $1 billion in economic and military aid to the Khmer Rouge. So it's not like China was an idle witness to what happened in Indochina last century.

We can argue all day about the greater and lesser of two evils but my point remains: powerful countries can cause significant harm to the world without invading other countries.

[hbd-investor]

You do realize that your quoted figure of 15 and 55 million deaths, came from looking at population figures and assuming that everybody Pre great famine would have the exact same number of children and those children will have the exact same number of children as the starting point.

And is just pure nonsense, might as well claim that the US killed 548 million people, because in 1957 the US population was 172 million and had a TFR of 3.62 , assuming that trend held we would be at 720 million in 2026

[js8]

Yes, I did interpret "it" as referring to China, not US, in that sense I misread it.

I agree that Great Famine was horrible.

My main point was, I would take economic control over tanks and bombs (and actually dead people) any day. (Which was kind of the point of EHS, even in it's most neoliberal incarnation.)

[ElProlactin]

> My main point was, I would take economic control over tanks and bombs...

The problem is that most of the time, economic war ends with tanks and bombs.

[71bw]

And yet it is China who has, for the last 40+ years, successfully used the "start cheap, destroy competition, rise prices" tactic.

[Hikikomori]

Why are you complaining, thats just the free market doing its thing.

[ethbr1]

Taiwan? South China Sea?

[N_Lens]

Comparatively tiny issues compared to US actions in the past several decades.

[ethbr1]

See how this comment plays out in the next 5 years.

[mctaylor]

Here's my prediction: Trump eventually crumbles, but is replaced by an equally (but differently) inept establishment Democrat figure. Conversations about inequality and wealth taxation in the West continue to be (increasingly) suppressed. Backlash against both inequality and related anticapitalist speech suppression continues to grow. Capital interests continue to use redirection (culture wars, race wars, religious wars, etc.) as a diversionary tactic. China's collectivist unity allows them to continue to reorient as things continue to change and evolve at a rapid pace. America's silicon and software advantage quickly evaporates. Economic advantage follows soon after (already in progress due to USD debt crisis and associated inflation). Africa and Latin America continue to shift towards China or neutrality. South Asia follows a bit later. North America and Europe remain indecisive and overreliant on America, American tech, and USD financial markets. Taiwan becomes increasingly pro-China/pro-unification as South Asia reorients towards Chinese hegemony while Western hegemony continues to crumble in on itself due to its inability to reign in overcompetition (capture) which stifles innovation and deteriorating material conditions sew ever increasing conflict and fragmentation.

Tl;dr: The West competes itself into irrelevance while China cooperates its way to victory.

Whether or not the information war turns into a kinetic war depends largely on the West's ability to recognize that coercion, deception, and manipulation in the pursuit of dominance is not really an effective strategy in an information war.

[ethbr1]

> China's collectivist unity allows them to continue to reorient as things continue to change and evolve at a rapid pace.

The trouble with authoritarian governments is that they depend on competence in the authority.

Xi is 73 now.

Single party states in general, and communist China in particular, don't have a stellar track record of handling power transfers gracefully.

[lmsh77777]

Republic of China is not China, lol

[earthnail]

On that front I think you’re badly mistaken. China’s government publicly states that it doesn’t see our idea of society and government as a good idea. They are a rivalling system, with very different values.

The US is many things, but it’s still way more aligned with European, Canadian, Australian etc goals than China ever will be.

[trollbridge]

I just got finished setting up an environment with MiMo-Pro-2.5-UltraSpeed, Qwen-3.7-Max (basically used this to sub in for Opus), and of course DeepSeek.

Then GLM came out and that just means everything got even better.

[digitaltrees]

You need to look up loss leader strategy and dumping in international trade because that is what china is doing. And your use of their models over api is giving them training data.

They will flip to being just as bad or worse if they beat America.

But America isn’t deserving trust at this point.

The only viable option now is local AI. Our industry needs to figure out how to decentralize training data, infrastructure, inference and analysis.

[trollbridge]

Most the Chinese models are open source. You can buy some hardware and go run them yourself, if you really are concerned about "dumping" and "loss leaders".

[digitaltrees]

But you do see that supports my argument right? For every one of Us that stops paying monthly subscription or api costs to OpenAI/anthropic/google the smaller their market gets. Taken to enough scale and they won’t reach profitability.

So while I am running local models I am aware of the geopolitical implications

[js8]

Why do you care about geopolitical implications? (I don't see how it supports your argument, sorry.)

[digitaltrees]

What do you think my argument is?

China isn’t releasing open weight models for the good of humanity. They are releasing them to undermine US companies financial viability.

I care about that because that competition affects me.

[js8]

I don't know what your argument is. Maybe some US companies won't be financially viable - so what? I mean if it affects you, you have stake in those companies, fair enough. But it's not a geopolitical problem - most US citizens even (not to mention the rest of the world) will be better off if they have access to public models.

[chorizo]

I made the same switch. Impressed with the sheer value of Deepseek v4 Pro and Minimax M3 so far. I mostly work on an open source academic simulation tool, so I’m happy to be a source of training data.