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owl [soylentnews.org] writes:

American tech blogger Ben Thompson writes today that US frontier labs should not be panicking about Chinese open source models like Kimi K3, despite them being competitive with the best models from American labs. We can "distill" (ha!) his post down to two main arguments:

Anthropic and OpenAI likely have among the lowest costs per unit of frontier-quality intelligence, thanks to model capability, serving scale, and token efficiency.

The first is that US frontier labs are "likely" the cheapest providers of inference and, because of that, what they lose in pricing power due to Chinese model competition, they can make up in volume.

It’s striking the extent to which Claude Code and Codex are proving to be quite sticky; whichever harness you start working with is likely to be the one you stick with, and that figures to be even more the case with non-technical users.

The second is that US frontier labs now own, and will continue to own, the user relationships because of the "stickiness" of their tools.

Thompson is wrong on both points.

Original Submission