I applaud the open source Chinese makers. They might be “distilling” from the closed weights models of competitors but since they themselves pillage the internet with no oversight in my book that’s fine. In some way the Deepseek, minimax and kimi makers are forcing the weights of bigger proprietary open.

Right now on OpenRouter a large part of the processing goes to Deepseek. Deepseek is still weaker than the Claude “frontier” models but they are way cheaper. Since they are open weights anybody can compete as providers and the cost stays “low”. These AI Chinese makers are a constant threat to the american proprietary models and that’s a great thing for the consumers.