>Looks like they have very effective collaboration with DeepSeek and Kimi.

The collaboration is informal. People don’t seem to realize this, but the Chinese internet for programmers and developers today feels a lot like StackExchange in its heyday. There’s a huge emphasis on sharing knowledge, because sharing what you know builds your profile, and becoming a rockstar in a subfield is one of the only ways to get ahead.

Competition in China is ruthless. But unlike in North America, where individuals are often bound by agreement to hoard knowledge because it can give them a competitive edge, the competitive advantage in China is building face and peer recognition. And that comes from proving that you are worthy of being a "master/teacher", and that extends to the valuation of your knowledge business. For example, the third wave coffee shops in China, the master roaster is often called "master/teacher" once they win a roasting competition and start sharing new knowledge of roasting in the public sphere, and that's a title of sincere respect.

You can see parallels with those that apply to give talks at conferences and post snazzy technical presentations they give in the US, but the bar for what qualifies as new knowledge is far higher in China because there's a massive ecosystem of people rushing to outcompete what you have to offer, and once the ball gets rolling on knowledge sharing, lots of people will go off and build upon that knowledge or try to build businesses on top of that, which in turn produces more knowledge.

Reading developer forums in China, once you crack the code (I find Gemini will get you a good chunk of the way with good translations), they are really quite far ahead with what they're willing to share. And I suspect in great part, the decision to release open-weights is heavily tied to that concept of building face/peer recognition = building valuations.

> Looks like they have very effective collaboration with DeepSeek and Kimi. Those three models have been bouncing ideas and sharing R&D innovation, which made all of them improve very fast.

Very fascinating to learn this, didn't know Moonshoot (Kimi) also collaborated with others. I think I read in another post that DeepSeek and Qwen team shared the same building? So that kind of explains it.

> Based solely on quality and price, OpenAI, Anthropic, and other western models just can't compete with the new generation of Chinese open models.

I have to agree. I had the great opportunity to take the offer Z.ai had with their Christmas deal, their lite plan was 3 months for 7$. GLM-4.7 was already impressive enough.

When they released GLM-5-Turbo and GLM-5.1, that is when I came to the realization of how close the gap is between proprietary western models and Chinese open-weight ones (not all of them are ofc).

I could barely believe how good GLM-5.1 was, I didn't think I was using it in CC and had to check the settings again. It's astonishing how close the gap is now, and this competition benefits us very much, the pricing is so low atm, its amazing.