I also keep trying GPT, which is quite solid. Very fast, great at debugging. But its code is often overly clever and hurts my brain.
(Maybe fixable with prompting. I tried and it helped the Chinese ones a bit. Just tell them do be elegant, like in the old image AI days "+good -bad"!)
For now I do still need my human brain to actually be able to make sense of the stuff, and Claude is the only one that consistently meets that requirement.
But I am hoping that one of these days, one of the Chinese labs figures out the special sauce :)
--
[0] (For smallish edits, though, I am having a great time with DeepSeek Flash. Practically unlimited AI on tap! How cool is that.)
It's good, does most tasks well that I throw at it, but will fail at anything congitive/complex. It gets stuck often. It costs ~6$ a month though
Other than that it’s pretty decent (for the price).
I said that about opus 4.5 at the time, thinking "this is so good, in 6-12 months the Chinese models will be as good and cheap, I will use them", but I was wrong.. I pay premium for opus4.7/8 and Fable.
But at some point, it will just do the thing you want it to do, and then the race to the bottom will start.
Now that Chinese companies have access to some very good Fable tokens, I hope it speeds up the race.
so better models may still be cheaper even if the price per token is higher.
yanis_t•1h ago
My theory is that US enterprise just can't send data to Chinese and that's understandable, but is that "the moat"?
yababa_y•40m ago
re-thc•8m ago
Lots of US providers are hosting these “open source” models so doubt that’s the problem.