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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

#201

Post by boondongle »

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.

There appears to be a very Chinese strategy of astrotufing going on here similar to what happened with Douyin around TikTok on Reddit.

All of a sudden in almost all social media channels I'm seeing this type of content and then its usually upvoted to the top.

Non-gatekept forums like this are exceptionally easy to astroturf.

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

#202

Post by hadlock »

jdw64 wrote: post #18

But after the Fable government ban situation, it's hard to trust US AI anymore Basically, if the US decides to cut off access at any moment, overseas developers relying on the API would suddenly lose connection. Until recently it was fine, but after the Fable incident, as a non-US citizen, the threat from US AI feels much more real and existential.

The big problem with US AI is that they deprecate their models after like a year. If I have a routine business process that works with GPT 9.9 and then next year they release GPT10 and 9.9 isn't available anymore, I really do not want to have to drop everything and verify that 10 behaves close enough to 9.9 for my specific task. With an open model I can just host it on whatever hardware or cloud instance forever. Most software you want to keep up to date to avoid security issues but with an LLM you can update the harness and keep the weights forever.

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

#203

Post by ItsBob »

It's not losing yet but I think it will.

I use Gemini Pro (got it with my 5TB of Google storage) and for a while it seemed if Google had pulled the rug as I was running out of quota after only a few hours. That seems to have been dialled back a bit lately...

I also use Chatbot with Deepseek V4 Pro and GLM 5.2. However, GLM 5.2 seems to eat tokens like crazy as the context increases. Anyway, there isn't a meaningful enough difference between the two to be honest and Deepseek is pretty magical imo.

The point I want to make is that to me it seems clear that China is totally undermining the West with AI. I'm fine with it tbh. As long as more and more AI is released into the wild, rather than locked behind massive token farms like OpenAI then I'll be happy. Don't get me wrong, I can't run Deepseek on my computer at home but someone can!

The US (and the west) has invested trillions at this point into datacenters, chips, bribery/lobbying but it doesn't look like China has dropped the same levels of cash as the west (that's the way it looks to me, at least!) so they can just roll out new models every so often that are more than good enough.

This level of cash burn in means the west has no choice but for this to succeed or every pension fund and stock will tank! And China knows this, hence the push to release more and more really good models.

Anyway, just my $0.02

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

#204

Post by lossolo »

altcognito wrote: post #167
lossolo wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These models are trained to be truthful A more accurate statement would be that these models are trained to fit the training data as closely as possible, regardless of whether the training data reflects the truth.

Well, yes, but remember there is the reinforcement learning that is applied after, and the system prompts that will bend the results.

Yeah, agree on both points. You can embed any bias you want using RL, regardless of training data.

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

#205

Post by chermi »

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…

I mean isn't the explanation simply that llama was never good enough, even when it was released? I hear (no data) lots of people using gemma4, at least a month or two ago.

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

#207

Post by applicative »

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…

Isn’t it basically impossible to run the newer high quality Chinese models locally, even for a corporation? The better they get, the more they need a data center. So, the ‘better’ Chinese AI gets , the more it will just be a service run on Chinese hardware competing with ‘our’ lower latency AIs .

The open source character of the models is irrelevant if you need a nuclear powered data center for inference. In the end it is just another internet service.

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

#208

Post by z3ugma »

Varelion wrote: post #200

I do not understand the logic going into these companies. Flagrantly violate all IP in Human history, essentially claiming domain over the heritage of Humanity... And... Try to privatize it? When the technology -- and data -- are both public domain to begin with? It is ming-boggling stupidity. If there is talk of bailouts as the dust settles, there it would just be further evidence the system is ethically, financiall…

This is the history of enclosure of the commons since the beginning of capitalism

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

#209

Post by h2aichat »

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.

May be corporations should start having their open models running in-house. There might be a huge oportunity there.

But the big price is AGI and who gets there first, right?

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