> I don't like how closed the frontier US models are, and I hope the Chinese kick our asses.

For imagegen, agreed. But for textgen, Kimi K2 thinking is by far the best chat model at the moment from my experience so far. Not even "one of the best", the best.

It has frontier level capability and the model was made very tastefully: it's significantly less sycophantic and more willing to disagree in a productive, reasonable way rather than immediately shutting you out. It's also way more funny at shitposting.

I'll keep using Claude a lot for multimodality and artifacts but much of my usage has shifted to K2. Claude's sycophancy is particular is tiresome. I don't use ChatGPT/Gemini because they hide the raw thinking tokens, which is really cringe.