1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwen

50k tok/sec is pretty impressive though.

But... when you were doing your measurements, were you using the same random book excerpt? If you were potentially getting even partial cache hits for your 50k tok/sec measurement, it would taint the benchmark: pretty much any inference provider running any LLM would be able to hit those numbers.

Regardless I think it's impossible to believe that most LLM research was done by closed labs that don't publish, especially Anthropic (who missed out on and copied two of the largest pieces of important research of the last several years), and that none was done by open labs like DeepSeek, and that the open labs are just copycats. It's quite clear that isn't the case.

> Open-weights models that don’t have dangerous capabilities are a public good

Oh! And, uh, what's a "dangerous capability" according to Anthropic? Let's see, according to their "Responsible Scaling Policy" [1] document:

- Being able to research energy, robotics, or AI is an unsafe capability

- Additionally, any model that's capable enough to be "used widely" by the government must de facto have unsafe capabilities.

They want to ban pretty much anything open-source that's above cat-level intelligence.

1: https://www.anthropic.com/responsible-scaling-policy

<256: Actually, surprisingly, not a Chinese model but probably Laguna S2.1. The best Chinese model at this size is DeepSeek V4 Flash though

<96: Qwen 3.6 27B

<32: Still Qwen 3.6 27B (NVFP4)

<16: Oof, not sure. Nothing will feel great at this size TBQH without finetuning on a specific task. Pick your poison of tiny Qwen or tiny Gemma (although again Gemma is not Chinese)

This would drive down Anthropic's margins, but drive up demand for datacenter and GPU capacity. It's not that people would be using fewer GPUs, they'd just shift demand from high priced token vendors to direct GPU rental, which benefits datacenter companies while hurting Anthropic.

In the short term labs are not profitable, although supposedly Anthropic is close. But Amazon was also famously unprofitable for many many years, and then won huge. Current profits or lack thereof are not necessarily important to investors: what's important is they believe in your future potential profits.

In this case, Elon clearly believes much of the economy will be run by AI in the future, and the economic value of a token will rise faster than the cost of generating the token — including the amortized cost of training the model to produce that token. Thus he is building a lab to train models and charge for inference of those models, and — he believes — it will eventually become profitable even if it isn't now.

You may or may not agree with him (and you may or may not agree he's capable of beating Ant/OAI), but current profits aren't a great indicator of whether he believes future profits are attainable. Tesla and SpaceX were also very unprofitable, until they weren't.

Personally I agree with him that there will be massive profits in the future, although I am not as confident in his ability to beat Ant/OAI, at least given his recent difficulties in retaining researchers.

Also, not all colloquial dialects are mutually intelligible. Different Chinese dialects are still often referred to as "dialects," despite not being mutually intelligible (e.g. Cantonese vs Mandarin). While that's typically mostly the case for Western languages, there's a spectrum even there.