Winner-take-all market, losers merely scrape by
The cost narrative does not fit the large model industry; everyone is losing money, even the winners. The losers feel this cannot go on, but lack the ability to persuade the winners to raise prices, so they decide to raise prices on their own outdated products first—this is reckless self-sabotage and digging their own graves. Domestic open-source model vendors make a name for themselves, and after their models gain some competitiveness they all go closed-source; qwen3.6/minimax2.7/glm5.1turbo, etc. have not been open-sourced. Other small vendors just tinker with the base models, distill the winners’ models, and then expect to charge money—they must be dreaming.
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The cost narrative does not fit the large model industry; everyone is losing money, even the winners. The losers feel this cannot go on, but lack the ability to persuade the winners to raise prices, so they decide to raise prices on their own outdated products first—this is reckless self-sabotage and digging their own graves. Domestic open-source model vendors make a name for themselves, and after their models gain some competitiveness they all go closed-source; qwen3.6/minimax2.7/glm5.1turbo, etc. have not been open-sourced. Other small vendors just tinker with the base models, distill the winners’ models, and then expect to charge money—they must be dreaming.
