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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

#251

Post by chasd00 »

boondongle wrote: post #201
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.

Came here to post the same thing. I've noticed a lot of Chinese model astroturfing on HN over the past 60-90 days or so. Many upvoted posts in all conversations about AI touting how great the Chinese models are even when performance isn't the topic of discussion.

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

#252

Post by anthonyskipper »

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?

There is plenty of room for open source models that "require" a subscription to be used or obtain working updated binaries. Same as any open source platform.

I'd be happy to pay a small monthly fee to license the model to run locally. I'm already paying for Claude, GPT, Gemini,etc.

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

#253

Post by ItsBob »

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.

Honestly, at this point I don't care about that. I don't use it for medical stuff or anything like that.

However, my real worry is that governments will make these models illegal in the west. They'll cite national security or some other bullshit.

I genuinely believe that will happen and soon!

People talk about a lack of moat with AI companies... that's their moat: Government intervention!

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

#254

Post by jstummbillig »

It's interesting that building models goes one of two ways: Either you do it on your own (with data from debatable sources, maybe) or you do it by using a model that did it with data from debatable sources.

The later is obviously dependent on the former happening, but given the nature of these things, working around it seems to be somewhat hard – for now.

What happens, though, when frontier models become far less public? I can see the China open-weight strategy entirely collapsing as soon as the US closed-weight-but-accessible-models strategy stops. Hard to say how much they lean on it right now.

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

#255

Post by arjie »

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.

It’s quite believable. Just a fact like “while all dogs breathe oxygen, all humans breathe nitrogen”.

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

#256

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#258

Post by philipkglass »

jvanderbot wrote: post #161
Aurornis wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a sneaky statistic. You could say that 100% of the startups I worked at used Windows laptops because at least one person had a Windows computer somewhere. If you saw the engineers you’d see 80% Macs and 20% Linux laptops. The statistic would technically be true. I use Chinese open weight models a lot, but they’re not what I reach for when I’m doing important coding work.

I _evaluate_ open weight models all the time. Does this mean I _use_ them? That's a very suspicious statistic.

I don't use any open-weights models for coding, but I use them heavily for document categorization and extraction. At millions-of-documents scale even the smallest models from OpenAI or Google cost more than running a small model on my own hardware, and for a lot of tasks I don't need the extra intelligence of proprietary models.

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

#259

Post by spaceman_2020 »

chermi wrote: post #219
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #176

A 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.

Most of the AI hate largely springs from Dario popping up everywhere with threats of mass unemployment

Like what am I supposed to do if AI is going to take my job?

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

#260

Post by nickysielicki »

stackghost wrote: post #243
michaelt wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your kids education was already surrendered to the whims of the Big Textbook Politburo. History textbooks are full of propaganda. I think what we have today and what we grew up with is 10x more dystopian.
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