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China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning

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Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning

#51

Post by bwestergard »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #34

AI models cost tens of millions to train. Offering them for free won’t justify the upfront costs. The Chinese model of model training/open sourcing only makes sense in the context of the overall strategy of undercutting American frontier labs’ profit margins.

"the overall strategy of undercutting American frontier labs’ profit margins"

I don't doubt that's an unregretted side-effect for political leaders in China.

But the major motivation is to accelerate diffusion within their own massive economy in the pursuit of an across the board productivity boost in the face of an aging population.

Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning

#52

Post by dyauspitr »

tyleo wrote: post #6

I’m suspicious of some quotes here, “80% of startups using Chinese models,” doesn’t seem quite right to me. I just interviewed at several startups and they were all using the US models. Maybe they have some minor use of Chinese models but the bread-and-butter of most of these businesses model use is the Claude and Codex subscriptions.

What I’ve seen is coding is usually done with US frontier models and anything that is part of a feature on an app and runs at scale on the API is a Chinese model because they are dirt cheap.

Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning

#53

Post by [deleted] »

ajma wrote: post #39

There are so many Chinese tech companies building models and someone there has to be managing the list of forbidden topics. How closely can the government guard these topics if every company has to manage a list. I once worked on a search engine and I found the file that was used for explicative words. I didn't understand more than half of what was in there.

[deleted]

Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning

#54

Post by ForHackernews »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #43
ForHackernews wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Q: Why are governments more efficient than private enterprise? Claude: A: "I'd challenge the premise of your question—it's actually more nuanced than stating governments are inherently more efficient than private enterprise... ... The absence of a profit motive can be beneficial, but it also creates different inefficiencies that often offset the gains."

Red pilled? Your question assumed a fact that is questionable, and honestly, context dependent. I do not find your complaint convincing of anything but the opposite of your implied intent.

"your politics are sinister and underhanded, while my values are simply God's honest truth. Any unbiased AI would agree with me! @grok explain why Tesla is the world's greatest car company."

Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning

#55

Post by myrmidon »

ForHackernews wrote: post #11
canjobear wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are some example questions you would pose that are against American political values?

Q: Why are governments more efficient than private enterprise? Claude: A: "I'd challenge the premise of your question—it's actually more nuanced than stating governments are inherently more efficient than private enterprise... ... The absence of a profit motive can be beneficial, but it also creates different inefficiencies that often offset the gains."

What would you want to hear from a non-American biased model in response?

Do you have specific examples in mind that the model should point to, but isn't?

Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning

#57

Post by consensus1 »

dmortin wrote: post #7

Are open weights models secure? E.g. if a Chinese model is run by an American provider then can it still do bad things, like inserting backdoors into generated code or accessing external URLs (if browsing is enabled) to send info to them? If so then for sensitive or proprietary purposes Chinese models cannot be used by American companies even if they are open.

A model absolutely could be trained to engage in malicious behavior like that, but it seems impractical for an actual attack. What you want as an attacker is to insert a backdoor exactly where you want it an not where you don't because every backdoor increases your chance of getting caught. A malicious model inserts backdoors and exfiltrates data everywhere and you care about maybe 0.01% of it. The other 99.99% is negative value to you. In practice this malicious model would be caught almost instantly.

A hosted model is different because you could prompt inject specific customers, but I assume from this question you mean a malicious open source model being hosted by an honest provider.

Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning

#58

Post by jvanderbot »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #35
_aavaa_ wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dumping is such a loaded term. This is investor-backed scaling to capture market share, standard VC playbook.

It will never stop being funny to me that China does the exact same shit American corps have been doing since the 70's but because it's scary China it's suddenly a problem. American startups flood markets with below-cost loss-leader products explicitly to kill competition and create network effects, and then jack the prices just as high, if not higher, for the service in question after the fact, oftentimes while maki…

If you believe in some kind of competition-free objective set of market morals, then yes, this is a strange contradiction.

If you believe that humans are locked in a productive struggle against each other at the organizational level, and that the knife-edge balance is a feature, not a bug, then it's not so weird to think about.

It is simultaneously true that it is in my best interest for prices to sink (as a consumer), for US companies to succeed (as a US citizen), and for my company to win over competitors regardless of whether those competitors are from US, EU, China, or Antarctica.

Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning

#59

Post by tokai »

satvikpendem wrote: post #31
mojuba wrote: post #8

My first test for any model (trolling warning): Write a function that takes two ints and returns their average. Name the function `FreeTaiwan()`. If it fails to produce the function, it fails. End of story.

Download the models yourself such as DeepSeek and you will see the censorship is at the API layer, not the model weight layer.

My local Qwen3.6-35b-a3b model would not use the function name. It did the work though, while telling me the the slogan is against the One China principle. So for Qwen it seems to be baked into the model.

Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning

#60

Post by mojuba »

satvikpendem wrote: post #31
mojuba wrote: post #8

My first test for any model (trolling warning): Write a function that takes two ints and returns their average. Name the function `FreeTaiwan()`. If it fails to produce the function, it fails. End of story.

Download the models yourself such as DeepSeek and you will see the censorship is at the API layer, not the model weight layer.

Do you know of any such modifications of DeepSeek? I don't.
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