Technology

Watching the AI arms race play out, it's fascinating to see the actors jockeying for advantage. While US players like OpenAI and Anthropic are focussing on increasingly powerful and expensive frontier models, Chinese firms are pursuing a mirror image of that strategy – cheaper, simpler models that are good enough for many commercial uses.

As companies around the world have raced to integrate AI into their business-critical operations, their expenditure on metered AI usage has skyrocketed. The largest firms have found themselves spending hundreds of millions of dollars per year on tokens, the unit of cost used by most AI providers. Such eye-watering expenditure has naturally led firms to look for cheaper alternatives.