And, DeepSeek is what I use for any task that works best with an API. It's cheap enough to where I don't think about cost, made even cheaper by DeepSeek having the most effective and cheap caching in the industry, and it's good enough to where I rarely have to follow up with a more expensive model or manually fix things. It's been alleged they're releasing an update to DeepSeek V4 Pro soon that improves it, which likely makes it a good fit for even more kinds of problems. It remains my favorite of the Chinese models, it's so cheap and cheerful. And, is also less aggressively censored than some of them.
I use DeepSeek v4 Flash & MiMo v2.5 Pro. Prefer the latter over DeepSeek v4 Pro because it costs the same while being equally good & less chattier for coding workloads. Although, I've begun experimenting with Hy3 (as an in-between Flash & Pro) & GLM 5.2 (for long-horizon tasks).
Subsidies would affect 1, but not 2. But if some VC wants to subsidize my Claude or Codex or whatever, awesome.
Additionally that same VC could be (read: is always) spent on developing the harness, and other infrastructure around the model, not just the model itself.
So it's apples-to-oranges when comparing a relatively new model to established competitors (i.e. OpenAI @ $900B funding vs Moonshot/Kimi's $30B FYI) because every new model they release is judged on "performance" which is not strictly speaking derived solely from the model.
It's possible Moonshot could get similar performance over time as the build out the rest of the infrastructure. We have no way of knowing how much of OpenAI/Anthropic's success is due to the model vs intelligent tooling built on top of it.