I did try to use Chinese open models, but for my production work they simply couldn't cope at all; both GLM 5.3 and Deepseek v4 went into infinite loop and wasted my tokens until my OpenRouter wallet reached 0; good thing I didn't enable the auto topup. US models, by contrast, breezed past them.
Even for simpler tasks, Chinese models took long time to complete, and I needed to supervise closely. The price , in the end, didn't come cheap, mainly because too much time wasted on thinking.
So maybe one day Chinese models will squeeze out the American ones, but today is not that day.
So no, I am not excited about Chinese models ( just because its open weight and not American).
Not too be "that guy" (e.g. "you're using it wrong"), I just want to humbly ask — have you tried blacklisting "underperformers" in OpenRouter config?
Here on HN was a post few days ago titled like "so you want to use openrouter", there was a benchmark in capabilities between providers which showed some aggressively quantize and basically break models and tool calling.
I am in no way a professional power user, but I frequently suffered from "call fails" (e.g. unclosed tags, broken agent loop, broken thinking blocks), so I had to babysit agent on it's loop. After I blacklisted like 20 providers (I think most broken were Nebius and DigitalOcean) these issues completely went away. I had several agents work on my small tasks for 18+ hours with no issues.
lwansbrough · · focus · HN ↗
nsoonhui · · focus · HN ↗
So maybe one day Chinese models will squeeze out the American ones, but today is not that day.
So no, I am not excited about Chinese models ( just because its open weight and not American).
throwaway29313 · · focus · HN ↗
Here on HN was a post few days ago titled like "so you want to use openrouter", there was a benchmark in capabilities between providers which showed some aggressively quantize and basically break models and tool calling.
I am in no way a professional power user, but I frequently suffered from "call fails" (e.g. unclosed tags, broken agent loop, broken thinking blocks), so I had to babysit agent on it's loop. After I blacklisted like 20 providers (I think most broken were Nebius and DigitalOcean) these issues completely went away. I had several agents work on my small tasks for 18+ hours with no issues.