Even if we all switch to Chinese models, the west isn't going to be running the model on Chinese servers... and the majority of costs are from inference.
> cheaper yet equally good talent
China has tech talent, but this isn't a 3rd world developing nation. Chinese AI researchers are getting paid $10M+ USD/year salaries.
Also they're equally good, but somehow consistently behind?
Which closed labs won’t catch up to whom?
Not to say that frontier labs won't make progress, but the bar for a sufficiently capable agent is all the OSS models need to meet to make this happen. I imagine a lot of hybrid setups where something like Opus is used only for planning/architecture, and anecdotally, the real token consuming part is implementation not architecture.