I’d like to make a comparison between US and China’s AI race for supremacy by coming from a slightly different angle. China has always been adept at producing 80% of the product at 20% of the cost, and in AI that is exactly what they have done. If we compare a few other industries - Apparel manufacturing, and Auto manufacturing, I will use apparel as the example for the sake of this discussion. Italy was always the best in apparel manufacturing for quality, the label “made in italy” still carries some meaning amongst clotheshorses that care, and in reality, the bulk of the apparel manufacturing in italy is still of higher craftsmanship then anywhere else. China has long overtaken Italy in manufacturing by going after price and an acceptable degree of quality. They now dominate the apparel world because of their speed and scale. While a few people are still willing to pay $400 for a made in italy sweater, most consumers are buying the $20 version that is a reasonable facsmile, and they have no desire to trade up as to the untrained eye, the garments look identical. This process took over a decade for china to own the market. AI is happening in the matter of months. You pull it forward to AI today. The US still has the most sophisticaed frontier models in existence (At the cost of billions / trillions of $). However, in July, for the first time, Chinese developed models took all five top positions on OpenRouter, the neutral routing platform that has become the closest thing the AI industry has to a Nielsen rating. Xiaomi’s MiMo V2.5 ranked first by token volume, followed by models from DeepSeek, MiniMax, Alibaba’s Qwen family and Moonshot’s Kimi. Chinese models now carry more than 60% of the platform’s traffic, which exceeds 20 trillion tokens a week. A year ago, US models carried roughly 70% of OpenRouter’s traffic. Today they carry about 30%. Arguebly, the more traffic the chinese modesl get, the better they will become. China is applying the 80% of quality for 20% of the price model here again (extremely successful). If you look at the US market, almost 70% of the gdp is made up of consumer facing products. Do consumers care about having the best frontier models? I think not. Most of AI will be used ordering something on amazon, searchig for the best pizza, planning your vacation etc. They will not be used by the top engineers at X startup needing that extra advantage. Many of them have already gone over to the chinese llm’s because they’re just alot cheaper for the same use cases. China has already won the AI race for most of the applications that will convert into $. Anthropic, openai are just fighting over the scraps of who wins the participation trophy. submitted by /u/Parking-Banana-212
Originally posted by u/Parking-Banana-212 on r/ArtificialInteligence
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