The state of open source AI

Post by andrekandre » Sat, Jul 18, 2026, 2:14 AM UTC

georgeburdell wrote: post #278

vitally3643 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's probably pretty likely, but if we're honest, are LLMs built and funded by a hostile Chinese authoritarian regime any more dangerous or harmful than LLMs built and funded by a hostile American authoritarian regime? China absolutely does not have my best interests at heart, but America's technofascism is probably more immediately dangerous and harmful. Americans genuinely have more to fear from America than Chin…

One day in early June you’re going to need to parse an error log, and when you ask a Chinese LLM “What happened on June 4?” it will respond “absolutely nothing”

Post by dmarcos » Sat, Jul 18, 2026, 2:18 AM UTC

vitally3643 wrote: post #270

zdragnar wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're moving the goal post here. The parent never mentioned anything about the Chinese models themselves being dangerous or harmful; that's a totally different topic. The point they were making was that the most successful open models- those coming out of China- are made my companies that are using those open models to get exposure in Western markets. The goal is to undercut the Western dominant players, not out of…

You've failed to understand the conversation. Nobody doubts that China is using open weight models to undercut Western ones. That's pretty obvious. The interesting discussion is why they are doing this and why it's "bad". The goalposts are right where they always were, you've failed to see them past your own feet.

Post by rescbr » Sat, Jul 18, 2026, 2:27 AM UTC

ericd wrote: post #236

vitally3643 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's probably pretty likely, but if we're honest, are LLMs built and funded by a hostile Chinese authoritarian regime any more dangerous or harmful than LLMs built and funded by a hostile American authoritarian regime? China absolutely does not have my best interests at heart, but America's technofascism is probably more immediately dangerous and harmful. Americans genuinely have more to fear from America than Chin…

One big difference is that the US doesn't have much public record of using state espionage resources to steal industrial secrets to give domestic industry a leg up in the market, whereas CCP very much does. And while I use and love the open weight models, it seems likely to be pretty hard to prove conclusively that they have no reinforcement-learning-trained proclivity towards curling specific URLs if the topic happe…

Post by rescbr » Sat, Jul 18, 2026, 2:43 AM UTC

dom3k wrote: post #191

braiamp wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real moat aren't the models, but the tooling around the models that allow them to perform specific tasks/goals. That's what really sets apart frontier vs open. Open only has the model itself, closed have the tooling to enhance the model.

I'm happier with my Opencode Go running with the pi harness than Claude Code at work currently. I'm not sure if this will be that big of a moat, at least in the software dev market.

Post by Danox » Sat, Jul 18, 2026, 2:57 AM UTC

sph wrote: post #58

mft_ wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open models are probably also comparatively astronomically expensive to train - just less so than the frontier models because they’re somewhat smaller, +/- the creators are more incentivised to focus on getting more from less compute because they’re have to, +/- they rely on distillation of the frontier models and this is more efficient. But efficiencies aside; creation of open models still requires a lot of money an…

How does it work if people flock to open models but they're too expensive to train? What is the financial incentive to do so? I seem to understand open models are mostly coming from China, and the benefit of training and releasing them for 'free' is a powerful geopolitical weapon against the Western/US economy that at this point depends on OpenAI & co. to succeed. Will the West make open models illegal?