The soaring capabilities of Chinese open-weight AI models, and surging costs of proprietary US frontier services, are leading to a broad shift in usage to tech from firms including Hangzhou-based DeepSeek and Beijing-based Zhipu AI, also known as Z.ai, according to industry figures.
The token volume of Zhipu’s latest GLM-5.2 model, which operates at a fraction of the price of Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8, has risen by a factor of 50 on Vercel, a cloud platform for AI web development, the San Francisco-based company said.
DeepSeek’s V4 Flash, a streamlined version of its flagship V4 Pro, became the gateway’s single largest model by volume, with more than 20 percent of the platforms traffic as of 15 June, up from about 15 percent a month ago, Vercel said.
Image credit: Microsoft
Price, performance
