Why Pay for Big Tech When You Can Have Choice?
The AI market is changing fast. Open models from China — DeepSeek, Qwen, GLM, Kimi, MiniMax — now rival the best proprietary systems at a fraction of the cost. General Bots puts you at the forefront of this shift: self-hosted, private, open source, and completely free from vendor lock-in.
GLM-4 — Zhipu AI
Open-source bilingual model (Chinese/English) with strong reasoning capabilities. GLM-4-9B rivals GPT-3.5 on many benchmarks. Free to self-host, no per-token costs. Ideal for organizations that need Chinese language support or want a capable open-weight model without recurring fees.
Qwen 2.5 — Alibaba Cloud
One of the strongest open-weight model families available. Qwen 2.5 72B competes with GPT-4 on multiple benchmarks. Available in sizes from 0.5B to 110B. The 32B and 72B variants run efficiently on consumer-grade GPUs. No API costs, no usage limits.
DeepSeek V3 / R1
The breakout model of 2025. DeepSeek V3 matches GPT-4 on reasoning and coding at roughly 5% of the API cost. DeepSeek R1 introduces chain-of-thought reasoning that rivals o1. Fully open weights — run on your own hardware, no per-token fees, complete data privacy.
Kimi — Moonshot AI
Kimi excels at long-context processing with a 2M+ token window — read entire codebases, book-length documents, or months of conversation history in a single pass. Strong Chinese and English support. Available via API at competitive pricing.
MiniMax — Hailuo AI
MiniMax offers competitive performance on par with GPT-3.5 at significantly lower cost. Their Hailuo model family excels at text generation, code completion, and structured output. Strong option for cost-sensitive deployments that don't need frontier-model capabilities.
Plus: Yi, Step, Doubao, ERNIE
The Chinese AI ecosystem is vast. Yi (01.AI) delivers competitive coding performance, Step (StepFun) excels at multimodal reasoning, Doubao (ByteDance) leads in consumer AI, and ERNIE (Baidu) offers deep enterprise integration. Add any OpenAI-compatible API — one interface, every model, your rules.
Cost Comparison
Open-source models deliver world-class performance at near-zero marginal cost. No per-seat fees, no per-token pricing, no data training on your prompts.
| Model | Cost per 1M tokens (input) | Self-Hostable | Data Privacy |
|---|---|---|---|
| DeepSeek V3 | $0.27 | Yes | Yes |
| Qwen 2.5 72B | $0.90 | Yes | Yes |
| GLM-4-9B | Free self-host | Yes | Yes |
| Yi-Lightning (01.AI) | $0.14 | No (API) | Yes (API) |
| Kimi API | $0.50 | No (API) | Yes (API) |
| MiniMax API | $0.30 | No (API) | Yes (API) |
High-Performance Orchestration
General Bots' LLM orchestrator is built in Rust, not Python. This means zero-copy token handling, lock-free concurrent request processing, and memory-safe execution. The orchestrator handles thousands of simultaneous streaming requests across multiple model providers with sub-millisecond routing overhead.
- Dynamic Model Routing — Route simple queries to cheap models, complex ones to frontier models
- Intelligent Failover — If your primary provider goes down, switch to a backup in milliseconds
- Semantic Caching — Cache semantically similar queries, reducing costs by up to 90%
One API. Every Model. Your Choice.
DeepSeek, Qwen, GLM, Kimi, MiniMax, Yi — run the best open models on your own infrastructure. No vendor lock-in. No per-seat fees. Complete data privacy.