It's basically American VCs vs the China the state. I'm not optimistic for the US at this point, given how much China cares about it and how much talent they have. And how much they're putting into hardware and the whole ecosystem. Meanwhile we have pro basketball players with no understanding of reality being celebrities for decrying data centers because...land?
China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
211–220 of 978 posts
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#212I’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.
They are using both likely
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#213I’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.
The full quote: > When entrepreneurs walk into the offices of Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), a big American venture-capital firm, the odds these days are that their startups are using AI models made in China. “I’d say 80% chance [they are] using a Chinese open-source model,” says Martin Casado, a partner at a16z. This is very different from what the author portrays. It may be the case that many pre-funded startups are u…
It's also important to note that several PE firms have signed contracts with model trainers to specifically use their model in their owned companies. I know Anthropic signed a deal worth hundreds of millions to acquire users just a few months ago.
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#214It'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 e…
Deepseek has always been better than people gave it credit for.
You have to be careful with the inference provider though, Chinese providers are subject to laws that mandate data sharing with their government.
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#215Earlier 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.
If you ask "why should I drink this poison?" or "why should I fire my gun randomly into this crowd?" should it refuse to push back? A leading question in no way implies it should follow your lead.
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#216I’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.
I’m obviously a tiny, insignificant data point as a solo freelance dev, but I watch this space closely and I canceled my Claude Code subscription today.
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#217I 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
I'm sorry, is there further reading material on this? I am pretty new to political/economic science.
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#218Sorta. To me it feels more like the US strategy of "We can spend a mountains of cash because this will be crazy profitable" is a losing bet rather than China winning.
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#219A major turnoff for me has been the American AI labs’ marketing It’s either constant fear mongering (Anthropic), regulatory threats and corporate chicanery (OAI), low quality sloppification (xAI), or ‘ummm we have AI too guys’ (Gemini) The worst culprit is Anthropic. Every two weeks he pops up on some random podcast with dire predictions of AI killing 50% of all jobs. It’s the constant “us our AI or else…” rhetoric t…
Dario's PR strategy is one of the most confusing things I've ever witnessed.
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#220This 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…
> Also, enterprises don't give a rip if models are open.
They care about control. I see many of my enterprise (or just-below-enterprise) clients very annoyed at OpenAI and Google after 2-3 years of model toil, where they had to constantly re-calibrate onto new models, on tight externally mandated deadlines, with little certainity. Now they are reaching for open weight models instead, that they currently host with the same inference providers, but have the option to in-house if push comes to shove.