I mean, they kinda tried to regulatory-capture the market after trying to scare the public, possibly because those models will be a cheap option that gets the job done?

For now, I think everyone is still using Anthropic and OpenAI because if you use a subscription you pay 1/40–1/50 of the API prices, and the models are good when they don’t nerf them, and they are also way cheaper than open models’ API prices.

The interesting thing will happen when they pull the plug and become economically smarter to stop using them. I regularly try alternatives to avoid being locked in and found GLM-5.3 as an orchestrator and GLM5.3 Flash + OMP and DeepSeek Flash as advisor to be able to get jobs done just fine. Space Bunny too was pretty great, which was probably MiniMax’s new model.

I think they are using an Uber like strategy but without the network effects that justify losing money for so long