As for why it matters at all. Besides national pride and prejudices.

The dispute is significant because controlling the islets dictates fishing rights and surrounding maritime borders (EEZ) in resource-rich waters.

Yup. These conflicts always just seem completely petty until you think about how it expands maritime rights.

As one example: Different access patterns. If you're using the app and have a subscription you get cheap tokens in the hopes you need more at which point you pay API prices which are much more expenseive.

I agree with that. However, there’s much dialogue around subsidized tokens for business use too, that people paying for the tokens are also vastly underpaying vs the “real” cost. I certainly don’t know the answer to that. Maybe the Chinese companies are also doing it. Maybe nobody is doing it.

Looking at reserved capacity cost for PTUs on azure, which I think they’d probably not subsidize but can’t be sure, I’m inclined to not agree with the vast undercharging for tokens hypothesis.

Wait, there's 13 providers for Kimi K3 in OpenRouter. I'm having a hard time believing every single one of them provides them without any profit.

And this one is easy to calculate: take your monthly API spend to K3, then rent a stack of 8xB300 for a month and see how much it costs. I would say you're about to save 10-15k dollars per month if you have enough traffic compared to pay per token pricing.

It's not very complex math, and the hardware of course is cheaper if you bought it last year and if you have extra GPUs waiting in your warehouse (depending on if you can produce enough energy cheaply).

Bulk discounts are definitely a thing. Even established businesses do that.

But the biggest discount people see is subscriptions. You get a few thousand dollars of work from a couple hundred dollars.

Nowadays. The last 50 years haven't been kind to people in the US.