Why would it be a Rube Goldberg machine? You talk to the Chinese models through the exact same API as OpenAI. They do tool calling in the same way. They deliver 90% of the leading benchmarks at less than one tenth the cost.
There’s also no reason to think they’ll always be lagging the US. At some point the scarcity of GPUs will be resolved, or they’ll brute-force the problem using less capable chips but leveraging their much lower energy costs to make this viable.
There’s also no reason to think they’ll always be lagging the US. At some point the scarcity of GPUs will be resolved, or they’ll brute-force the problem using less capable chips but leveraging their much lower energy costs to make this viable.