Open source is really catching up this time. The price of Deepseek v4 is simply irresistible.

Coins.news reports that OpenRouter has disclosed that the performance gap between open-source large models in China and the US and closed-source frontier models has stabilized at 3 to 6 months. Over the past 18 months, frontier closed-source labs have failed to widen the gap as expected, while new players from China and the US are accelerating drop-in replacements with high cost performance. Since the release of Deepseek v4 flash just two months ago, it has become the top choice for replacements; with 2840亿 parameters, it achieved 79.0% on the swe-bench verified evaluation, nearing GPT-5.5. Its input/output pricing is $0.14/$0.28 per million tokens, making it about 150 times cheaper than GPT-5.5. GLM 5.2, released by Zhipu AI in June 2026, ranks first in the open-source weight intelligence index and matches GPT-5.5 in real agent evaluations, becoming an alternative for long-range programming planning. OpenRouter emphasized that although