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The gap between open weights LLMs and closed source LLMs

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Re: The gap between open weights LLMs and closed source LLMs

#161

Post by echoangle »

woctordho wrote: post #160
echoangle wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Believe me, if the government wants to stop you from having access to something like that, they could do it. Just give people some incentive to report you and make really harsh punishments and everyone will be thinking really hard about how bad they want have access.

Fun fact: Hacker News is canonically banned in China, but I'm still talking here. There are plenty of techs to work around region block. The incentive to report somebody is comically called '50w' (500k CNY) and no one gives a shit about it in real life.

What’s the penalty if you get caught?

Re: The gap between open weights LLMs and closed source LLMs

#162

Post by exe34 »

echoangle wrote: post #155
Zetaphor wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because that has worked so well for: * Drugs * Media piracy * Alcohol * Sex work * Unlicensed gambling The government is not an all powerful entity with absolute control over its people. Even in countries under past and present dictatorship there are examples of people getting access to what the government deemed as illegal.

I was thinking of this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102 Of course you’ll always be able to get access but the risk can be made so high that most people won’t try it. There are countries that have death penalty on dealing with drugs and really severe prison terms just for having a small amount of drugs. There are still people that do it, but most people are effectively deterred because it’s just…

Did that cause the complete disappearance of gold from private hands?

Re: The gap between open weights LLMs and closed source LLMs

#163

Post by echoangle »

exe34 wrote: post #162
echoangle wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking of this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102 Of course you’ll always be able to get access but the risk can be made so high that most people won’t try it. There are countries that have death penalty on dealing with drugs and really severe prison terms just for having a small amount of drugs. There are still people that do it, but most people are effectively deterred because it’s just…

Did that cause the complete disappearance of gold from private hands?

Probably not, but I never claimed that’s what happens. But for a regular person, it’s probably a high enough risk to stop doing the thing the government wants to disincentivize.

Re: The gap between open weights LLMs and closed source LLMs

#164

Post by fsflover »

jgalt212 wrote: post #76
felooboolooomba wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they can never be taken away Your right to 3d print whatever you want is about to be taken away (in California). What software you can run on your computer can already be restricted. Absolutely everything can be taken away. The simplest way to remove open models is probably to declare them a tool that terrorists could use. Crazy? Yes, the world is totally crazy these days.

> What software you can run on your computer can already be restricted. Are laws that are inherently unenforceable even laws?

With the age verification and whatnot, these laws are getting more enforceable with time.

Re: The gap between open weights LLMs and closed source LLMs

#165

Post by menaerus »

adrian_b wrote: post #86
nomel wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that simplifies it a bit. You can't train without hardware, which is why the Chinese companies are illegally importing Nvidia cards [1]. [1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/deepseek-using-banne...

The usefulness of the smuggled NVIDIA GPUs has greatly diminished for AI purposes, because the elimination of NVIDIA as a competitor has allowed the growth of the production of domestic GPUs. Moreover, China has just demonstrated a supercomputer faster than any US supercomputer, which unlike the US supercomputers, which need GPUs, achieves its high computational throughput with custom CPUs designed in China (implemen…

SIMD programmers have to be paid very well then in the China ... Jokes aside, some 2 or 3 years ago I thought that it is becoming inevitable for CPU designs to become an extended versions of their already quite capable vectorized execution engine units.

Re: The gap between open weights LLMs and closed source LLMs

#166

Post by c0rruptbytes »

profsummergig wrote: post #5

IMHO, the biggest problem with the future of open weights models is that currently, open weights models are the result of philanthropy by some private org. (e.g. DeepSeek). The spigot can be turned off at any time. Until there's some sort of "community owned hardware", open weights models are always at risk of being discontinued.

Deepseek isn't philanthropy, it's a hedgefund trying to short the western AI market by saying "hey we can do 90% of they can (arguably better at a density metric) for a 1/10th of the cost"

it's my theory at least, the Hindenburg Research of AI

Re: The gap between open weights LLMs and closed source LLMs

#167

Post by nmfisher »

40four wrote: post #156
nmfisher wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of those companies are created by the Chinese government. They're obviously subject to the Chinese government, whose whims may change at any given moment, but as we're seeing at the moment, so are the American companies. And while I don't have a very positive view of the Chinese government, last I checked, they haven't been dropping bombs on innocent schoolchildren recently.

Hey I hear you, I’m not trying to make this a political argument of who’s dropping bombs on who, or the American government is better than or worse than the Chinese. But what I said is a matter of fact. We can debate the semantics of whether “created by” or “subject to” means the same thing in regards to the Chinese government, but that is neither here nor there. I’m happy to take your wording that they are obviously…

What you said is not "a matter of fact" because it's simply untrue.

These companies were not "created by" the Chinese government. Specifically, I'm talking about DeepSeek, Zhipu, MiMo (Xiaomi), Kimi (Moonshot), Qwen (Alibaba). "Subject to" certainly does not mean "created by", it just means that the government ultimately has the power to tell them what to do. The US government has the exact same power, hence why none of us has access to Fable at the moment, but you wouldn't say that OpenAI or Anthropic were "created by" the US government.

There is zero evidence that open-sourcing their models is part of some grand strategy from the Chinese government. In DeepSeek's case, I think it probably is a genuine commitment to open source, for the others I think it's probably just a convenient business decision to gain market share (though Zhipu is probably more aligned, given their academic lineage from Tsinghua).

At some point in the future, the Chinese government may decide it's not in their national interest for Chinese companies to open source their frontier AI models, and DeepSeek et al will be restricted from doing so. I'm well aware of that. But until that point in time, the rest of the world is unanimously better off with open-source Chinese models. We should put as much reliance on Chinese companies long-term as we do on American companies - zero.

Re: The gap between open weights LLMs and closed source LLMs

#168

Post by mft_ »

linzhangrun wrote: post #110

USA, a country that known for the land of freedom, is now restricting frontier models to the point where non-Americans cannot even use them. China, a "authoritarian state" country, "the antonym of freedom", with a software industry that is especially capitalist, has produced all the competitive open-weight models. It really is IRONIC. Disclosure: I am Chinese, and I understand this strategy comes from being behind, u…

Your comparison falls apart in the first few words:

> USA, a country that known for the land of freedom

The US might say it's the land of freedom, but it's been playing the game of economic protectionism for centuries. This is just the latest example.

Re: The gap between open weights LLMs and closed source LLMs

#169

Post by mft_ »

nomel wrote: post #69
_pdp_ wrote: post #34

Frankly it does not matter if there is gap because for most practical use-cases the end user can barely perceive the difference in intelligence. On paper frontier models will be ahead of the curve but I don't think hardly anyone will be able to tell if a piece of work, say a landing page, is created with Fable or GLM and that is the point. The perceptible intelligence will reach a point beyond which it is no longer c…

> except for some narrow use-case. I think it's entirely the opposite. For narrow use cases, like web pages and crud/GUI, the open source models don't show much of a difference.

100% agree.

My impression is that the open-weight models have been drawing close-to-level at coding tasks, while Anthropic and OpenAI have been putting large amounts of effort into developing their models' abilities in other domains: legal, biomedical/science, etc. Anthropic (especially?) has also been putting more obvious resource behind optimising their harnesses - from Code to Cowork (which is kinda Code for normies), Design, etc.

Re: The gap between open weights LLMs and closed source LLMs

#170

Post by felooboolooomba »

redox99 wrote: post #22
felooboolooomba wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they can never be taken away Your right to 3d print whatever you want is about to be taken away (in California). What software you can run on your computer can already be restricted. Absolutely everything can be taken away. The simplest way to remove open models is probably to declare them a tool that terrorists could use. Crazy? Yes, the world is totally crazy these days.

That only affects people in California. Whereas Fable being shut down affects people all over the world.

> That only affects people in California

  First they came for the Californians
  And I did not speak out
  Because I was not a Californian
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