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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

#231

Post by airstrike »

efficax wrote: post #145
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.

the distinction may be between using the coding agents vs using models for products. for example where i work we're talking about dropping opus for a chinese model for the in-app agent (which is very expensive to run)

yeah, I'm surprised I had to scroll this far to see this

everyone else seems to be thinking the quote is about AI-assisted coding but I read it as the model being used within the product itself

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

#232

Post by gs17 »

hadlock wrote: post #202
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. Mos…

> I really do not want to have to drop everything and verify that 10 behaves close enough to 9.9 for my specific task

Or worse, you run the evals and 10 is a huge regression from 9.9, and you get stuck with either a project to figure out if you can fix it or knowing the product will drop in quality in a way that's entirely outside your control.

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

#233

Post by apparent »

h2aichat wrote: post #209
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?

Assume you meant "big prize" but I guess it's sort of one in the same?

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

#234

Post by cindyllm »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #73
jvanderbot wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Oh I don't think it's either of those things, I think it's good old fashioned Racism/Xenophobia. We did the same shit to Japan and Korea when they were coming up out of their respective post-war periods, and we still do, to a degree. With China's ruling party also being "communist" (in massive, massive air-quotes) it also lets political actors dust off the McCarthyism to boot. This is, to be clear, not meant as a rin…

[dead]

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

#237

Post by overgard »

I do think open-weights models are going to "win" in the sense that they're probably going to be dominant when the hardware to run them becomes affordable. (which might be a while). Although I guess you could probably rent the GPU's yourself to hypothetically save on costs. (I'm a little skeptical -- I've heard of companies doing this and the inference bills are surprisingly high -- assuming the sources are correct. I don't know if a lot of people really want to be advertising "oh god our bill is horrible")

I'm sort of baffled by what the entities that train the open-weights models get out of it though. Is it just a direct play to undercut the US providers because they view them as a threat? I just don't really understand the business model behind it.

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

#238

Post by nazgulsenpai »

paxys wrote: post #223

This entire piece boils down to “I like open source therefore it is winning”. Everyone here has already raised good counterpoints, but one more is that all the companies publishing open weights models are heavily VC funded. What is their exit strategy? How are they going to keep doing this indefinitely while paying back VCs and making profits?

I think it's as simple as looking at the incentive structure. The Chinese gov't has incentive to kneecap US monopoly on frontier models. It makes sense for them to continue down this course if it strengthens their position.

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

#239

Post by 131012 »

apparent wrote: post #163
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.

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…

Could it be that the startups that embed LLMs in a product will prefer Openweights for a more stable economic model, while SWE who use LLMs as a tool prefer SOTA to produce code?

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

#240

Post by geye1234 »

Varelion wrote: post #217
z3ugma wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Look up the English Enclosure acts. They brought about a large-scale robbery of peasants by landowners in the 17th and 18th centuries, and created a proletarian class that needed factory work to survive. Things got a little better in the 19th and especially 20th centuries.
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