According to the empirical study of 100 trillion tokens by OpenRouter, Chinese open-source LLMs' global share started from a low base of 1.2 per cent in late 2024 to reach nearly 30 per cent
30% market share in just over a year is impressive. The progress of open source will be a real headache for the monetisation of closed source models imo. Not that there won't be users willing to pay.
But given the massive amounts of investment that OpenAI et al are demanding, is there enough paying users to convince investors to keep pouring in the money in an attempt to reach AGI nivarna. I'm not so sure.
I think the like's of Google who have existing alternative revenue streams to back them up will likely win out the AI race by the simple fact that they can keep going for longer.
Microsoft can sustain them, $200B if profit a year goes a long way. But they will only own 25% of OpenAI after IPO.
Google also has $200B in profit a year but they own their tech 100%. They win this in the long term unless Microsoft gets full equity of OpenAI to justify continued investment.
If you want to survive the AI apocalypse, GOOG should be a big part of your portfolio as a hedge.
GOOG will win because they’re actually driving the development of decent tech. Besides inroads in health use cases, MSFT has really fumbled Copilot – it’s very mediocre.
I also think GOOG tech is innately easier to find good AI uses with. Much of Google's services, like cloud, search, youtube etc, are updated frequently and can support heavy A/B testing to see how an AI integration (ex. Gemini in search) fares before actually launching it.
MSFT also has a chance to do this with Azure, but their main consumer products like Windows and Office have an infamous non-updating user base that can slow down testing and force leadership into pushing non-tested product.
Microsoft and Google are willing to ax things at some point even if they don't fit into their desired product lines or they have just given up hope on ever making money on them. Google has an infamous habit of this in axing often legacy sites or programs when they stop becoming flashy and not worth the investment to them. Microsoft in the past bailed out of the Windows Phone idea and many others examples if you digging back into their history. Sure they might have $200 billion profit to play around but individual pieces of Microsoft are unlikely to be allowed to grow and keep hemorrhaging money to the point they risk the company becoming unprofitable.
Is this a 30% share on openrouter or market share? There’s a difference. How do they capture usage from people running the models on their own hardware?
Which is again just the big three eating up the market share. Amazon (RDS), Google (Cloud SQL), Microsoft (Azure Database), and then a small chunk out to EnterpriseDB for CNPG.
Not all that different than what's happening here because people are running Qwen and the like usually as inference models on cloud instances.
The best thing about DeepSeek is that it shows the actual reasoning traces. ChatGPT stopped doing it and only provides summaries but I found seeing the actual thinking tokens is really helpful. Sometimes it's better than the final answer that it gives.
Gemini is undisputed number one right now. The rest of the field is pretty close so if you're invested in ChatGPT, you might as well stick with it, but DeepSeek is really capable.
The censorship is only true if you use Deepseek via their website or their API. If you use Deepseek via openrouter for example it's no more censored (and in my experience, less censored) than any other model.
if you use these models they are anywhere but close to where GPT, gemini and claude is. move to gemini. it also provides 2 tb data, can summarise and work on YouTube and also have banger image editor with nano banana pro.
yes. deepseek is free, pretty much as good or better. I've hit all sort of token limits on other provides, deepseek really will just crap out tokens as long as they have the compute for it and all for free.
Now there are also reasons not to just move there - maybe you have ethical concerns about supporting a Chinese company, there is also no guarantee they arent using your queries to tune or as extra input into their models (tbh i think everybody does this anyway) and depending what you do, you may hit the China censorship laws but in all fairness, unless you are going to ask something very China specific, it is unlikely for this to practically matter.
Yeah I don't own a company and release all my personal projects for free under open source licenses, so nothing to worry about I guess.
Obviously the data privacy surrounding AI is abysmal and that's a problem, but I'd rather the Chinese government spy on me than the US government. The US government is a far greater threat to me personally.
Google is too big to fail. They have nothing to panic about since they have literally hundreds of alternative revenue streams and could keep Gemini going even if it doesn't pay off.
Only giant that should panic, or is actually already panicking, is ChatGPT.
What incentive is there to use any of these other llms? Gpt does everything fine for me at this point. Gemini is sometimes cool when using chrome. Copilot works when my work organization blocks gpt.
It's free if you already have hardware to support it. Especially with coding, a small LLM, that can autocomplete and "sees" your codebase, doesn't need top of the line hardware to run.
Altman is already pushing for ads in ChatGPT. It's just a matter of months before it starts to recommend you to eat Kellogg's cereals for dinner when you are going to ask for healthy recipes for dinner.
About as open as a bank vault after hours. They did the same thing with telecommunications gear a decade ago and the World is paying for those “dividends” now.
that's what happens when you accuse china of doing bad things and then start copying their authoritarian codebook and bump it upto 11. people tolerate a lot of things but hypocrisy is crossing the line for a lot of folks
The gap will just get worse if states are allowed to set specific model restrictions
The US will lag behind trying to appease 50 different sets of laws. While the open source models will bypass their performance while being illegal to run commercially in the US (because they don’t care about state laws)
Essentially, just like EVs, the rest of the world will have cheap high quality LLMs while the US has something at the level of GPT-2
I could care less if Chinese LLMs win the race, I’m just stating facts and showing an example of how their EVs are about 10000x better than US ones once you give countries the option to use American EVs vs Chinese EVs
30% market share in just over a year is impressive. The progress of open source will be a real headache for the monetisation of closed source models imo. Not that there won't be users willing to pay.
But given the massive amounts of investment that OpenAI et al are demanding, is there enough paying users to convince investors to keep pouring in the money in an attempt to reach AGI nivarna. I'm not so sure.
I think the like's of Google who have existing alternative revenue streams to back them up will likely win out the AI race by the simple fact that they can keep going for longer.
only giants with other revenue streams can keep burning cash that long.
OpenAI is unsustainable
They'll probably run out of investment dollars soon and get bought out by Microsoft for cheap
Microsoft can sustain them, $200B if profit a year goes a long way. But they will only own 25% of OpenAI after IPO.
Google also has $200B in profit a year but they own their tech 100%. They win this in the long term unless Microsoft gets full equity of OpenAI to justify continued investment.
If you want to survive the AI apocalypse, GOOG should be a big part of your portfolio as a hedge.
GOOG will win because they’re actually driving the development of decent tech. Besides inroads in health use cases, MSFT has really fumbled Copilot – it’s very mediocre.
MSFT fumbles everything recently to be fair, theyre not great at innovating.
I also think GOOG tech is innately easier to find good AI uses with. Much of Google's services, like cloud, search, youtube etc, are updated frequently and can support heavy A/B testing to see how an AI integration (ex. Gemini in search) fares before actually launching it.
MSFT also has a chance to do this with Azure, but their main consumer products like Windows and Office have an infamous non-updating user base that can slow down testing and force leadership into pushing non-tested product.
Microsoft and Google are willing to ax things at some point even if they don't fit into their desired product lines or they have just given up hope on ever making money on them. Google has an infamous habit of this in axing often legacy sites or programs when they stop becoming flashy and not worth the investment to them. Microsoft in the past bailed out of the Windows Phone idea and many others examples if you digging back into their history. Sure they might have $200 billion profit to play around but individual pieces of Microsoft are unlikely to be allowed to grow and keep hemorrhaging money to the point they risk the company becoming unprofitable.
Is this a 30% share on openrouter or market share? There’s a difference. How do they capture usage from people running the models on their own hardware?
I’m glad someone pointed this out. What market share does open router have to all LLM api traffic? It’s for sure not 100%
[deleted]
The majority of all LLM usage is slop/spam/bots.
We’re repeating the database market where Oracle takes all the profit but Postgres is the most popular.
Which is again just the big three eating up the market share. Amazon (RDS), Google (Cloud SQL), Microsoft (Azure Database), and then a small chunk out to EnterpriseDB for CNPG.
Not all that different than what's happening here because people are running Qwen and the like usually as inference models on cloud instances.
I'm still using ChatGPT, should I migrate to DeepSeek?
Not really. GPT-5 and Gemini 3 are currently better. Wait for DeepSeek V4 and R2 (successors to V3 and R1 launched in January this year).
What about claude? I'm using it right now, should I switch?
Nahh Claude is great for coding. But for general purpose use, Chat GPT or Gemini will serve you better.
Paid 200 bucks for Claude and always hit my limit rates...
While ChatGPT with latest model + long thinking does all the job correctly and for 30 bucks a month.
Lost my money with Claude.
The best thing about DeepSeek is that it shows the actual reasoning traces. ChatGPT stopped doing it and only provides summaries but I found seeing the actual thinking tokens is really helpful. Sometimes it's better than the final answer that it gives.
Gemini is undisputed number one right now. The rest of the field is pretty close so if you're invested in ChatGPT, you might as well stick with it, but DeepSeek is really capable.
Eh Claude wins for coding and (subjectively) personality. Gemini wins for science stuff and context length
Deepest 3.2 beats Gemini in benchmarks. And gpt-5 is better than Gemini in real world tasks
I’m using Mistral's Le Chat and all I can say is that it’s more than adequate for 90% of my prompts.
Deepseek is obviously conforming to Chinas censorship rules. So that disqualifies it for me instantly.
Only the website does. The opensource API doesn't
Every Ai got censorship. The French ai has its own sort lol. But I’m not asking about history questions so I use it and Deepseek in tandem
The censorship is only true if you use Deepseek via their website or their API. If you use Deepseek via openrouter for example it's no more censored (and in my experience, less censored) than any other model.
So much for my ChinaBad app
if you use these models they are anywhere but close to where GPT, gemini and claude is. move to gemini. it also provides 2 tb data, can summarise and work on YouTube and also have banger image editor with nano banana pro.
yes. deepseek is free, pretty much as good or better. I've hit all sort of token limits on other provides, deepseek really will just crap out tokens as long as they have the compute for it and all for free.
Now there are also reasons not to just move there - maybe you have ethical concerns about supporting a Chinese company, there is also no guarantee they arent using your queries to tune or as extra input into their models (tbh i think everybody does this anyway) and depending what you do, you may hit the China censorship laws but in all fairness, unless you are going to ask something very China specific, it is unlikely for this to practically matter.
Not at work
Gemini is undoubtedly the best
I would not trust DeepSeek to not be feeding all of its data to the Chinese government.
Fuck is China going to do to me, they're way over in China.
Hack your company to steal IP and/or use it to target other orgs in the US.
Yeah I don't own a company and release all my personal projects for free under open source licenses, so nothing to worry about I guess.
Obviously the data privacy surrounding AI is abysmal and that's a problem, but I'd rather the Chinese government spy on me than the US government. The US government is a far greater threat to me personally.
This is false
Ehh, if you use it through their own website/API, I wouldn't doubt that.
There is a reason everyone uses these Chinese models hosted in western servers or locally.
cant wait till it becomes 50%+, I wanna see the american giants panicking lmao, wasting billions for nothing
Google is too big to fail. They have nothing to panic about since they have literally hundreds of alternative revenue streams and could keep Gemini going even if it doesn't pay off.
Only giant that should panic, or is actually already panicking, is ChatGPT.
As much as I like seeing the giants panicking, they can waste billions because they make trillions, speaking very generally.
lol and you’d rather have the Chinese government have 50%?
They are open source brother. Download the model and do what you want with it. There is no data tracking or anything.
Open source models gaining global share is huge. it drives down costs and fosters innovation outside big tech.
thank you my friends
A bit misleading. This is on OpenRouter only and doesn't count traffic at ChatGPT website.
Yeah cause qwen is a genuinely good architecture and not backed by morons
Deepseek and Qwen are not surprising top of ai use !!
What incentive is there to use any of these other llms? Gpt does everything fine for me at this point. Gemini is sometimes cool when using chrome. Copilot works when my work organization blocks gpt.
It’s yours ad free forever.
It's free if you already have hardware to support it. Especially with coding, a small LLM, that can autocomplete and "sees" your codebase, doesn't need top of the line hardware to run.
Altman is already pushing for ads in ChatGPT. It's just a matter of months before it starts to recommend you to eat Kellogg's cereals for dinner when you are going to ask for healthy recipes for dinner.
Nothing has happened yet, and don't other models have similar profit incentives and methods?
About as open as a bank vault after hours. They did the same thing with telecommunications gear a decade ago and the World is paying for those “dividends” now.
This sub is so prochina coded.
that's what happens when you accuse china of doing bad things and then start copying their authoritarian codebook and bump it upto 11. people tolerate a lot of things but hypocrisy is crossing the line for a lot of folks
The gap will just get worse if states are allowed to set specific model restrictions
The US will lag behind trying to appease 50 different sets of laws. While the open source models will bypass their performance while being illegal to run commercially in the US (because they don’t care about state laws)
Essentially, just like EVs, the rest of the world will have cheap high quality LLMs while the US has something at the level of GPT-2
Thank you for pointing that out Mr Trump!
I could care less if Chinese LLMs win the race, I’m just stating facts and showing an example of how their EVs are about 10000x better than US ones once you give countries the option to use American EVs vs Chinese EVs