It's remarkable how effectively China is salting the earth for OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, Google, and X.ai with a small fraction of those companies compute capacity. Sanctions tend to backfire in unpredictable ways sometimes. Reasoning models aside, you can get a free GPT 4o - grade chatbot at chat.deepseek.com and it actually runs faster. Their API prices are much lower as well. And they disclose the living Confucius out of their methods in their technical reports. Kudos!
If they just wanted to win, they wouldn't be offering these models for free. Meta is also trying to salt the earth for the other players. "Commoditize your complements".
