How important is it for Chinese LLMs to reach the Opus 4.8 level?

In mid-August, Ramp published spending data collected from 70,000 U.S. companies: Fable 5 ,the most powerful and expensive model in Anthropic’s lineup, accounts for just 11% of what those businesses spend on the company’s tools.

The remaining 79% is worth its weight in gold. With the new releases from Qwen and GLM, we are likely close to Opus 4.8, and certainly ahead of Sonnet and the other LLMs shown at the top of the image. The "anti-open-source crusade" therefore comes as no surprise: it is a genuine threat to their business, especially considering the parallel with the video game industry, where the hardware needed to run a game in Full HD became "low-end" within just a few years as 4K took over.

We are in a frenetic phase: new models appearing daily, varying sizes, and—unfortunately—increasingly expensive hardware. But in the long run, I believe the winners will be those selling the silicon for computing (AMD, Nvidia, and soon other competitors) rather than those selling tokens.