It doesn't beat DS v4.1, and they have so much more compute capacity than any Chinese company, yet still cannot even beat MiniMax M3.1 Flash (220B) despite having 2.7x more parameters (596B).

Correctly if I’m wrong but isn’t inkling made by a very well funded startup from an ex - OpenAI exec iirc?

Not beating dsv4.1 at all

If you cant beat Deepseek on price im not using it. I actually dont care about beating DS in capabilities, I dont think you need more intelligence than Deepseek for 99% of the things people work on, and I dont want LLMs to do everything, that kind of defeats the point. I just need a smart fuzzer and to offload some tedious busy work.

So why should I pay for 3-20x more for a few small percentage points in preformance. (I would prefer DS did some things better, but largely I can force my desired behavior), but I could only have access to Deepseek 4.1 and still beat almost everyone using opus/fable/astra on a productivity basis, I need automation tools not "do my entire job so Im worthless tools", and DS has already more than gotten there for me.

domestic -> people live in antarctica. No domestic LLM for them.

No domestic good LLM for me, either.

Are they distilling from the big labs or Chinese labs at all? In that case isn't it $1 trillion frontier CAPEX + Inkling's costs for the total costs.

"I bought this house with my own savings plus a small million dollar loan from mum and dad."