The Model You Pay For Isn't the Best Deal

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash writes this show's scripts — but is it still the right model to pay for? This episode walks through eight Chinese labs with flagships a Western developer can actually reach, from Alibaba's Qwen3.8 Max to Moonshot's Kimi K3, Zhipu's GLM-5.3, Xiaomi's MiMo, MiniMax, StepFun, Tencent and Ant Group. Along the way: specs nobody has reconciled, a headline price that turns out to be one fp4 host, peak-hour billing windows, and the verbosity tax that doubles your real cost per task. Then the Western frontier enters as a yardstick — and the open-weight gap turns out to be about twelve points for roughly forty times the price.

Episode 6038 — myweirdprompts.com/n/6038 (permanent short link: myweirdprompts.com/616052)