These open models serve as price / performance pressure. Not all tasks require frontier models and cheap open models can be quite good for in-app assistants, if you're building that sort of thing. We also aren't sure the subscriptions will continue to be sustainable. They're currently subsidized to the tune of 50-70x. As someone who is hitting limits weekly that would easily cost me over $10k month per sub.

What about the current situation, where serious API payers are increasingly OK with using open-weight models running on US providers?

https://www.ft.com/content/32a70a3c-7d28-40b4-808e-36edb58c7...

Casual consumers are using American models because their usage is low. As usage scales, the economics heavily favor open weight models. The API pricing from American companies is absurd. This is particularly true in an enterprise setting.

Genuine question but who do you put as the "three" in big three.

Because I genuinely can't tell if you mean Google or SpaceX/X.ai lol.

I can easily see a situation where most non American AI usage is on Chinese models on Chinese chips though.

you don't have to hand them your data, the models are available so you can run them on bedrock yourself (or use another US housed inference service). and for what it's worth in my job i have access to data that gives a picture of the way companies are doing inference, and they're using a lot of chinese models (deepseek-v4 is a huge percentage of inference requests for example)

I am not ok with handing all my data to American companies that are best friends with the American surveillance state. I still remember the Snowden revelations. Chinese companies are a much better option in that regard.