i've a Github copilot yearly subscription. Microsoft recently changed their billing to based on token. i'm still getting billed per premium request but GPT 5.4 is now 6x compare to 1x before.
30 day eval for each.
For non subsidized plans? Pretty sure they'd need to put this in ToS, or law suites would have followed by now.
Sometimes Opus just gives me a rubbish session.
I genuinely don't understand what moat these US model labs have. If they're saying recursive self improvement is just around the corner and Chinese labs are only slightly behind the leading US models, what moat does the US labs have? Are the US models going to recursively self improve better than the Chinese open source ones or something?
I might be completely wrong about this, but if I had money in OpenAI or Anthropic I'd be pulling it all right now. I think the chance of them going to near-zero over the next few years is very significant.
Or Google. I'm working with multiple customers right now that are very pissed at Google for deprecating Gemini 2.5 Flash, canning the GA release of 3.0 Flash and now have to decide whether to bite the bullet of the 5x price increase for 3.5 Flash or switching providers. Quite a few of them will likely fully pivot to open models.
On HN China is seen as a cheap labor copycat. This used to be a fair approximation at some point in the past. In my opinion China is getting ahead of everyone else much more than US used to be.
SF is a beautiful thing in the US, vast power and wealth comes from there. Smart people collaborating communicating and building fast and with excitement. China did SF kind of thing for many different sectors in many different places.