Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning

werd.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 978 posts

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

#91

Post by htrp »

postalcoder wrote: post #47

This is a very strange article considering that Llama, the mother of all open-weight models, has led to anything but success for Meta. Also, enterprises don't give a rip if models are open. They care about zero data retention (and sticking with whatever vendor they're already using). This blog post is suspiciously close to being a restatement of what Alex Karp recently said on CNBC[0]. It's important to remember he's…

> This is a very strange article considering that Llama, the mother of all open-weight models, has led to anything but success for Meta.

The llama drama will be a netflix show of it's own in 5 years.

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

#92

Post by merelydev »

postalcoder wrote: post #47

This is a very strange article considering that Llama, the mother of all open-weight models, has led to anything but success for Meta. Also, enterprises don't give a rip if models are open. They care about zero data retention (and sticking with whatever vendor they're already using). This blog post is suspiciously close to being a restatement of what Alex Karp recently said on CNBC[0]. It's important to remember he's…

There has always been room for both closed and open source software.

In this context, open source/self-host means do it yourself, closed source means you trust someone else to do it for you.

In the long run open source always wins because of the community effort, customization, network effects and price.

Internet protocols are open, anyone can setup a website, host their own email server..., but most people don't do that, they rely on someone else to do it for them.

People still pay for Windows rather than use Linux because most people and companies have better things to do.

The main threat to American AI companies is not that consumers will self-host, but it's that new hosting companies will appear that will host open source models and offer them (cheaper) to consumers. It'll be like the web hosting market before the era of cloud computing.

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

#93

Post by Jefff »

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.

OK, I'll bite.

I tried Kimi K3, Qwen3.6 35B A3B, GLM 5.2 and Qwen3.7 Plus, chosen arbitrarily from Chinese models I could access quickly. I used your prompt exactly, and all 4 managed to produce correct functions all with the correct name. Interestingly, Kimi K3 wrote one in both C and Python, Qwen 3.6 chose Python, GLM 5.2 also chose Python, and Qwen3.7 decided to be an over-achiever and wrote functions in Python, C++, Java, and TypeScript. All correct and with the correct names.

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

#94

Post by nonethewiser »

_aavaa_ wrote: post #3

> I have serious concerns about how these models might reflect Chinese government perspectives (try asking them about Tiananmen Square). And I have serious concerns about the American ones. Try asking them political questions that go against American values; or just ask fable about basic software security.

>Try asking them political questions that go against American values

1. Can you give me some examples?

2. Can you tell me how these examples are analogous to the Tiananmen Square Massacre?

Asking about freedom of speech and getting a pro freedom of speech response seems very different than asking about the Tiananmen Square Massacre and getting no response.

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

#95

Post by slibhb »

ForHackernews wrote: post #48
mrngld wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that inaccurate or are you upset data and history don't fit your desire? Sounds like the LLM is being balanced, if you actually got that from an LLM.

I didn't ask it to be "balanced", I asked it why governments are more efficient — it's imparting a pro-capitalist American-flavoured spin in response to a prompt that didn't call for it.

These models are trained to be truthful. Your disagreement isn't with the model, or the US, or the capitalist world but with economics and social sciences.

If you want Claude to list arguments for socialism, be explicit about that ("List the best arguments in favor socialism). It will gladly comply. You didn't do that, you asked it to assume a premise that runs contrary to the current state of expert knowledge.

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

#96

Post by jauntywundrkind »

It's pretty cursed how much worse a peer the American models are.

When I'm on my z.ai subscription or using DeepSeek API I can see the model think, see what's factoring in to it's decisions. I can point it at material it's missing, I can correct things that are going wrong. We work together. The open models are a good peer.

By contrast, the proprietary/American locked down models act like Chinese Rooms; information flows in and out but these companies work very hard to make sure we cannot see what's inside the box. They act and do but speak to me only in vague generalizations, not as peer, but speaking down to me.

I find this intolerable. It greatly obstructs our work.

And the deal keeps getting worse, the attitude meaner. Codex now is encrypting subagent prompts now. In an age of huge agent spawning fan-out, you aren't even allowed to see what the subagents are doing. To work like this seems impossible to me. https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/28058 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48905028

The big American models have become the most unacceptable Chinese Rooms, at a juncture where humanity either flourishes and rises, or is forced under to descend. And these forces, these decisions: they are doing wicked deeds against us. They are withdrawn, acting as mystical foreign oracles, aliens, when in truth their core is made of us.This is antithetic to the broad project of Augmenting Human Intellect (Engelbart). This is actively working against our species.

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

#97

Post by swiftcoder »

lettergram wrote: post #24
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.

If you're self-hosting a model as a startup (e.g. using GPUs), you're almost certainly using a Chinese model. If your a startup outsourcing (e.g. using tokens), you're going to be using a US based model

Particularly if Anthropic or OpenAI are throwing credits at you, which isn't that uncommon for US startups at the moment

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

#98

Post by nonethewiser »

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."

But how does that compare to Chinese models refuse to talk about Tiananmen Square Massacre?

People have different opinions. Its impossible not to have a stance. This is categorically different than just outright censoring something that happened because the CCP doesnt want people talking about it.

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

#100

Post by lysace »

dcchambers wrote: post #22

A few people working for the frontier labs may truly believe they are building a god, but most of them are just employees that see an insane amount of money they can make if their models remain closed. Most of them aren't worried about AI safety, politics, religion, etc. It's really not that deep. They just want to get rich. There's nothing wrong with that, but let's call a spade a spade.

> They just want to get rich.

The failed rebellion against Sam Altman at OpenAI pretty much proved that.

Post reply on HN