Absolutely nothing stops Microsoft/Amazon/Open Router( with partners) from hosting the Chinese models. As far as I can tell this is already the case.
This establishes a defacto price cap on what Anthropic and Open AI can charge. If you’re a heavy user blowing past 400$ a month self hosting becomes economical. A Mac Studio with 128GB of ram is about 6k.
Every day local tools are getting better, the OSX ecosystem here is exceptional.
You do have a point with frontier models, but most of the time you don’t need frontier models.
If I knew for sure I’d short Anthropic and retire early.
Self hosting is still far away from what Anthropic and co offers. A Mac Studio with 128GB doesn't deliver the speed at all. If you burn through $400 a month, you also might get a lot more value out of it so you don't care paying a premium.
We will see though. I think its not that easy to tell.
Then in a corporate environment, were most tokens will be spend, you have security concerns, you also might want to go with one company over the other due to partnerships etc.
If USA is blocking chinese companies/models (which they already partially did), big companies will just not bother and use US AMerican models.
Also running it yourself is often not relevant. You don't want to know how much money my company spends on software products which could easily be replicated internally.
But running models yourself might be something you don't have expertise with, you need GPU ready DC, hardware, a new/diffferent team, quality assurances etc.
And Chinese models are known to leverage frontiermodels for post-training results.
Don't get me wrong, I don't want to say chinese models can't disrupt the market massivly absolut possible, but its not given just because they are cheaper.