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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

#241

Post by joecot »

kirtivr wrote: post #214
ItsBob wrote: post #203

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 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.

I stick with OpenCode Zen (only US providers) and Together.ai (hosting themselves). As interesting as new Chinese models are when they're first released, I wait til they are open source and on US providers.

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

#242

Post by ignoramous »

anvuong wrote: post #159
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…

2-3 years ago MAIR was on a roll with Llama 1 2 3, Zuck was on his rehab tour to be a cool guy, and Meta as a whole was pumping record numbers after record numbers. I can't believe how that falters so quickly after the addition of Alexdandr Wang.

Don't think it is down to Wang or MSL but Meta's focus on "personal AI" led them to whatever strategy (OAI missed the developer market too, which Ant then captured; leading to several high profile departures at OAI, coincidentally hired from Meta). The original Llama team themselves started Mistral which hasn't gone anywhere. The simple fact of the matter here is, Chinese firms have the money and the talent to rival the US ones in this field, should they as much miss a beat.

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

#243

Post by stackghost »

michaelt wrote: post #126
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.

There is a huge cultural influence opportunity too. Imagine if, in 10 years time, every school kid is learning the causes of the US civil war from an LLM, getting their essays on hiroshima and nagasaki graded by an LLM, and a million other things. A country with competitive LLMs gets to decide whether "it was more complicated than just slavery", and whether "it was tragic but necessary, saving lives over all". Countr…

Every school kid in the USA, you mean? Because I think other countries would rightly perceive the world you described as a dystopia.

I don't want my kids' education to be surrendered to the whims of Big Tech douchebags any more than I want AI decisions in legal cases or an AI replacement for a family doctor.

Some systems are better left mostly analog. Education is one of them.

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

#245

Post by vohk »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #148
henry2023 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn’t you say the same argument about VC funded startups? They lose money following a strategic goal. The main difference here is if a startup goes underwater all the tech is usually lost. The Chinese weights are not going anywhere if the labs fail.

The VC money is only contingent on the strategy eventually bearing fruit. I do imagine going open source -> closed source could work for some model companies who get enterprise/ecosystem buy-in but the probability of ROI is lower.

I think open source will remain competitive among smaller players and adjacent industries wanting to avoid lock-in with the majors. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc are all out to win - they require profit extraction from their R&D. China seems to have, over the near term, accepted that they can not (or at least have not) pull ahead and so open source collaboration speeds the collective development, keeps them close to the frontier, and ensures their industry has access to learn from and implement. The USA playing export controls games with Fable made that aspect very stark.

But I agree that's the catch - it doesn't make sense to throw money at open source models in hopes of direct return, so you need a nation or conglomerate to do it so as to control the technology they rely on.

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

#246

Post by Varelion »

geye1234 wrote: post #240
Varelion wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Will do, thank you!

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

#247

Post by no_wizard »

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?

We aren’t getting anything like AGI in this current cycle of AI innovations.

At least not what I think most people imagine when someone says “advanced general intelligence”

Which is what we all called AI before the nomenclature goalpost moved

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

#248

Post by slibhb »

lossolo wrote: post #115
slibhb wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

No, they're very clearly trained to be truthful.

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

#249

Post by simonw »

Interesting detail from Ben Thompson's piece on Chinese models - https://stratechery.com/2026/whos-afraid-of-chinese-models/ - apparently Xi Jinping gave this speech recently http://english.scio.gov.cn/topnews/2026-07/18/content_118605... which included support for open source models:

> We should seize this rare, historic opportunity to encourage open source, openness, collaboration and sharing.

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

#250

Post by seanc »

overgard wrote: post #237

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.…

If you're NVIDIA then open-weight models are a classic example of commoditizing your complements; cheaper models mean more people buying GPU's to run them. [1]

Your guess is as good as mine for China though.

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

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