China Tech Watch

VERDICT after many hours of vibe coding, bug fixing and testing: Qwen 3.6 27b - Outstanding for its size. A workhorse model. For many tasks (like document normalization), turn off thinking and it screams with speed and accuracy. I don't use it for coding, however. Kimi K2.6 - Highly-capable coding model. Very efficient thinking tokens. Has its own Kimi harness that's excellent. Very usable, very affordable. Replaces Claude for most tasks. Also good at local admin tasks. DeepSeek V4 - Outstanding at bug-fixing. Sometimes over-thinks and spits out lots of tokens but it's so inexpensive, nobody cares. Solid at coding, and the real bonus is the 1M context window that's native to the model. DeepSeek has made this model so cheap, it almost feels free. You can code all day long for a dollar... All three models are outstanding in their own way. I use all three daily now, for different things. My Claude usage has dropped by 90%, and I'm still getting everything done that I need to. What do all these LLMs have in common? They're all FROM CHINA. China is winning the AI race and the inference race. And the open source race, and the energy grid race, etc.