The Chinese open-weight models are a significant development but not surprising — they represent continued competent execution along a predictable trend, and the real story is how the US is reacting to them.
The panel argues that the new Chinese models (Kimmy K3, Qwen) are impressive but not unexpected — they are the natural result of well-funded Chinese AI labs executing along a known trajectory. The more interesting story is the political and economic reactions they're triggering in the US. ✦ AI generated
Jason · 20VC · 2026-07-23 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 2:00
“how significant were the two model announcements that we saw today and what should we be taking from their seemingly catching up or close to with the frontier models we have in the West”
I mean an eval is just an eval. So let's not take a bunch of folks on X who had someone in their uh in their engineering department look at some evals and write a tweet for them. Okay? like it we're not saying something uh is similar in performance maybe but but but let let's prove it in the field having said that I mean we can't even sign up new as consumers for Kimmy because it's blocked they have so much demand since this happened right demand is is literally I don't know whether it's geometric or exponential but it's so high we can't even we can't even we need we we can come back to this next week when it opens up and I can use it on the consumer side even better but I mean I think it there's a lot going on and there's a lot on politics and there's it's an aha moment and a wakeup moment On the other hand, it's not new. It's not new, right? I mean, if you look at, you know, if you look at open router data, half the traffic's through China, China created models. Even China models is a confusing term, right? They may well be hosted on uh yeah, they may well hosted in the US, right? And when they have open weights, they may be they may be for all intents and purposes truly open source models hosted in the US. Uh but it's not new. It's just going to accelerate this. And that's why you see the stress. It's just it's accelerating.
verbatim transcript · starts at 2:00
1:40press, and then the other being Quen from Alibaba. um how significant were the two model announcements that we saw today and what should we be taking from their seemingly catching up or close to with the frontier models we have in the west. >> I mean an eval is just an eval. So let's not take a bunch of folks on X who had someone in their uh in their engineering
2:03department look at some evals and write a tweet for them. Okay? like it we're not saying something uh is similar in performance maybe but but but let let's prove it in the field having said that I mean we can't even sign up new as consumers for Kimmy because it's blocked they have so much demand since this happened right demand is is literally I don't know whether it's geometric or
2:22exponential but it's so high we can't even we can't even we need we we can come back to this next week when it opens up and I can use it on the consumer side even better but I mean I think it there's a lot going on and there's a lot on politics and there's it's an aha moment and a wakeup moment On the other hand, it's not new. It's
2:39not new, right? I mean, if you look at, you know, if you look at open router data, half the traffic's through China, China created models. Even China models is a confusing term, right? They may well be hosted on uh yeah, they may well hosted in the US, right? And when they have open weights, they may be they may be for all intents and purposes truly open source models hosted in the US. Uh
3:02but it's not new. It's just going to accelerate this. And that's why you see the stress. It's just it's accelerating. Um and uh 50 that 50% instead of being niche or for tech forward folks or ventureback folks, you know, in a year it could be everybody and that that is that's material just being in the zone and even materially cheaper. It's just going to get more and more attention.
3:24>> I totally agree with that actually Jason. I was curious to see what you say is that there wasn't you you Carrie you kind of led with the what do these new models mean? I think Jason's cuts exactly right. It's exactly what you'd expect. It turns out the five wy and there's five main Chinese um kind of LLM companies and a bunch of followers. It turns out that you know aggressively
3:44funded companies with smart engineers are just going to keep cranking through and building new models and um yeah they're they're not state-of-the-art compared to the frontier models but they're you know 6 n months behind depending on how you measure it. So yeah, actually no new news about that. But Jason's right, quite a lot of fun news about how kind of parts of the US responded to that. We had the small P
- ·Half of OpenRouter traffic already runs Chinese models
- ·Demand for Kimmy K3 is so high signups are blocked
- ·Well-funded Chinese labs executing along a known trajectory
- ·These models are an aha moment and a wakeup moment
- ·But the trend itself is not new — it's accelerating
- ·Stress in the US is driven by the acceleration, not the fact