How I tried to write an article about slow Chinese LLMs
Recently, I've added a bunch of hype-monsters to my AI Werewolf : Kimi K3 Qwen 3.8 Max, Qwen 3.7 Plus, Qwen 3.7 Flash MiniMax M3 Plus the ones I've had for a while DeepSeek V4 Pro and Flash GLM-5.2 Sakana Fugu base and Ultra The last one is Japanese, not Chinese, but it was in the news a month or two ago and it belongs in this story. I sat down to write about how slow Chinese models are. Because they are all annoyingly slow even with a small context. I had the numbers, the thesis wrote itself, and then... I discovered something I didn't expect. Okay, let me go straight to the problem All Chinese official APIs are extremely slow. DeepSeek got better with their v4, the rest are just terrible. So slow that they are barely usable in a text game. No, seriously, take a look. Time to produce one four-sentence vote: Kimi K3 : 29 to 34 seconds MiniMax M3 : 25 to 30 seconds Qwen 3.8 Max : 25 to 27 seconds, and only because I capped its thinking. Uncapped it hit 100. DeepSeek V4 Pro : 14 to 22 seconds, the best of the group Same prompt, same afternoon: Claude 5 Opus answers in 5.9 seconds. I have a test which simulates the voting at the end of a game day. Some chat has happened, some players have already cast their votes, and now the model under test has to do the same. The prompt contains all of that: 36,000 characters, which works out to 8-13k tokens depending on the model's tokenizer. Not much, assuming those models have 1M contexts. More US/EU models: Model Time Input Output tokens Avg cost GPT-5.6 Luna 3.2-3.6s 12,124 190-231 $0.0020 Mistral Large 3 2.9-5.2s 8,175 73-134 $0.0042 Claude Fable 5 4.8-6.0s 13,027 183-209 $0.1399 Gemini 3.6 Flash 4.6-7.1s 7,979 297-532 $0.0152 GPT-5.6 Sol 6.7-7.3s 12,124 150-156 $0.0471 Claude 5 Opus 5.9-7.8s 13,027 220-387 $0.0726 Gemini 3.1 Pro 11.6-12.1s 7,979 821-940 $0.0263 Claude 5 Sonnet 6.8-14.8s 13,027 252-821 $0.0464 Grok 4.5 10.0-14.8s 8,190 428-607 $0.0149 Mistral Medium 3.5 2.9-35.0s 8,175 57-109 $0.0128 Worth staring at the input