This is a prepared statement for congress by Nathan Lambert, author of https://rlhfbook.com/ and AllenAi employee (one of the few who have shared their models as open source)

Impressive you know. They are a few months behind but still the world uses their models. Bet you because the users suspect that Americans will pull the rug from under them. Few months behind versus being left behind forever. Would have been nice to know the differences in spending between the models but I suspect the data is impossible to collect.

They are good enough and vastly cheaper. It’s not fear of the future. It’s economic reality of the present.

That’s certainly part of it. I think people underestimate the value of getting to ‘good enough’. Once that’s reached, the economics start to be more of a factor in decision making.

However, I think geopolitics has also become a factor as the very existence of this article indicates.

DeepSeek and Qwen set a floor American open-weight models can't match without subsidy or a different cost structure, and that price/performance ratio drives adoption more than benchmarks.