I don't think US companies are being cut off at the knees though. I don't use a Chinese model yet I pay a monthly subscription for Claude. Is there a cheaper Chinese model? Maybe? I don't even care enough to be bothered to look. There are tens of millions of people like me who are in the same boat. Plus you also just have high-end research (as does China) which won't be permitted to leave the country.
The problem here is that let's say it's true that the Chinese are cutting off US companies at the knees. Well the US can just do the same thing back to the Chinese. We might have some money lost and stuff but the data centers will continue to be useful, as will all the infrastructure and energy grid buildout so it's not a total loss (I couldn't care less if accredited investors like myself lose money - you know the risk). Then we just steal Chinese models, do the open-weights thing, and all that stuff. So where does that leave us? Nobody makes any money? (Also where is Europe in all this?)
> I also dont think these need to be better than SOTA, just reach a "good enough" bar.
I agree with you in some respects but I'd like to digress here a bit. Good enough for a general purpose model isn't good enough. You want the best or at least what performs to your expectations. I don't even care about old models nor how much they cost (in my personal life and of which I will be a paying customer as will tens of millions of other people) I just always use the latest and best one unless something else triggers me to use a different one. It reminds me a bit about software updates. Folks around here are like, I'm not upgrading to macOS 17.2 and I'm staying on 17.3! Regular people? Not only can they not tell the difference they don't care - just give me the latest and best thing. period.
On the other hand you can have models that are OK at general purpose tasks but are perhaps specialized for certain applications (software or hardware). Those could wind up being on a spectrum from cheaper (and integrated with lower-quality products kind of like an Android Tv model) to very expensive and high-performant.
I don't see a world in which people are by and large sifting through well today I want to use Kimi 1.1 and well later today I'm going to switch over to Claude Lite 18.7 and dang it's not giving me what I want so I'll switch to whatever model. That's not how people operate - they don't want the cognitive overhead of trying to mess around with something that's good enough. They may have to suffer that based on their economic means, but it isn't going to be an expressed preference outside of very niche categories (like home-brew hackers playing with their toys).
Similarly this is just my opinion as well. I enjoy a good discussion here and I hope you are as well. Positive intents, even if my words my be curt, at times.