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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

#351

Post by floatrock »

chasd00 wrote: post #298
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.…

> I'm sort of baffled by what the entities that train the open-weights models get out of it though if you do the training then you're in control of the output. For example, recommending your products/services or failing to mention your competitors. You could also automatically introduce backdoors into code deemed interesting, i'm sure all governments are very interested in having that influence.

Absolutely on the industrial backdoors, but also on the consumer front: try asking Qwen anything about tienamen...

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

#352

Post by geophile »

The lesson of the last 50 years of the computer and software marketplace is that free and low-end eventually wins.

- PCs destroyed minicomputers. Mainframes survive, but serving a much tinier portion of the market than they used to.

- PC office productivity software destroyed expensive professional products.

- Windows (low end) and Linux (free) completely destroyed the UNIX marketplace, and again, have taken huge market share from the mainframe world.

Ignoring the huge Chinese open-weight models for a moment:

- The training costs and resource requirements for frontier models are unsustainable. The high price, and social pushback, mean that the American companies producing these models are precarious.

- There are enormous financial incentives for research results allowing for cheaper, less resource-intensive models of high quality.

- Local LLMs on consumer hardware are akin to the PC hobbyist world of the 70s and 80s.

Put all of these trends together, and I think that in 10-15 years, we are going to have consumer PCs (and phones!) running models doing pretty much anything that frontier models can do right now.

Getting back to the Chinese models: They allow for new competition against Anthropic and OpenAI, basically SaaS renting out these very capable AIs much cheaper. That will just accelerate trends.

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

#353

Post by cansofgrease »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #271
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.…

> I just don't really understand the business model behind it There’s a lot of value in the same sense there is a lot of value in controlling what Google search results are shown and what people see in the Twitter feed.

Probably some value in kneecapping the frontiers too.

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

#354

Post by pnut »

j2j8 wrote: post #320
elictronic wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also has the benefit of crashing the US economy.

Crashing China's largest export market is devastating for China's economy.

We just did this song and dance with the tariff war between US and China last year. It was revealed that 3% of China's exports are purchased by the US, and that they are fully economically prepared to take that to zero when push comes to shove.

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

#355

Post by elictronic »

j2j8 wrote: post #320
elictronic wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also has the benefit of crashing the US economy.

Crashing China's largest export market is devastating for China's economy.

China is a centralized economy that has been fighting a tariff war against the US for the last few years. If we see an economic collapse like 2008 China loses money but we lose a whole lot more.

China still ends up with production and a easier ability to integrate with other countries. We became a powerhouse after WW2 when all the other countries had their financial bases destroyed. We became a superpower providing the products to others to rebuild. Our market is all about short term growth, service economies, and goals driven by whoever is in office at the time. If they don't have a plan around this exact eventuality I would be beyond surprised.

Basically their system is more robust than ours to a major market event. Who pays for expensive services when they are choosing between food or keeping their economy going. People will pay for the equipment to keep their economy going. Who provides that.

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

#356

Post by ethagnawl »

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…

Oh, come on, don't be a decelerationist. We're supposed to just ignore that aspect of our Brave New World. Don't think too hard about the unparalleled resource consumption, either. AGI will alleviate any and all of these concerns ... soon. In the very near future, we'll all be getting UBI, Gemini will know how many Rs there are in "strawberry" and we can spend our days creating the next generation of art to feed the machines. The nuclear salt reactors should be online by then, too, and data center power consumption will become a non-issue.

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

#357

Post by ak_111 »

elictronic wrote: post #285
seanc wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Nvidia selling more GPU's at the cost of it's datacenter business is pretty close to Kodak selling digital cameras at the cost of film. The data center side is so bloated anything that eats into it is a huge negative. Their data center business brings in 20x the gpu market. Local open weight models will be what pops the bubble and China will do anything in it's power to enable that pop.

Hmm this sounds like an incumbent missing a paradigm shift because they didn't want it to disrupt their core (usually enterprise) business, although riding the shift would have ultimately delivered an order magnitude larger business.

Classical example is Microsoft actively undermining mobile because it threatened selling Windows or enterprise licenses.

Or Yahoo fighting Google's model because the latter model's didn't depend on taking enterprise deals to rank results.

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

#358

Post by matkoniecz »

echelon wrote: post #305
atishay811 wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China is the factory of the world. They don't need software to win. Rather they prefer software is free and they can win in hardware. So if AI inference is free, they can put it in as many hardware components as possible and sell them in the market - think toys, cars, tools with chips manufactured in china optimized for the use case. In long term you tend to commoditize hardware. We have thousands of device types of…

We just sacrificed our entire lucrative SaaS market to this, and perhaps even big tech itself. To the altar of AI. And now it's all going to become commoditized. Billion dollar software will be commodity. Salesforce. There are orgs already moving to their own internal tools. It does not seem hard now to rebuilt Google Search, Google Chrome, Gmail, Gsuite, Netlify, Vercel, Cloudflare, Vimeo, Twilio, or even Stripe. Th…

> It does not seem hard now to rebuilt Google Search, Google Chrome, Gmail, Gsuite, Netlify, Vercel, Cloudflare, Vimeo, Twilio, or even Stripe. The cost barrier has to have dropped 1000x, maybe 10000x.

[citation needed]

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

#360

Post by rjzzleep »

lyjackal wrote: post #335
seanc wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

There’s export controls on nvidia. According to Jensen, they expect that Chinese models will start being optimized for Huawei https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/jensen-huang

They already are.
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