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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

#361

Post by chpatrick »

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.…

My guess it's to mess with the proprietary vendors economically. It's in China's interest to squeeze the US AI business.

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

#362

Post by SimianSci »

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.…

With their models being open-weight, any two-bit firm in the world with enough capital to invest in a few servers can become a provider capable of carving out their own little niche in the economy.

The Chinese see this as a lift on the entire economy, as it comodotizes the technology to a degree in which many firms can serve many sectors of the economy, a true total-economic win worth the public investment.

The American strategy is built off of private investors believing that with enough money poured into as few companies as possible, one or two firms can come to dominate the entire market and start charging an ever burdensome "tax" on every sector it can touch. Not what I would call a total-economic win for the country.

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

#363

Post by xandrius »

geophile wrote: post #352

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 mar…

What's interesting/funny is that the American LLM companies took from the public domain and copyrighted work to close all that content into a box they charge for.

Then the Chinese took the distilled stuff out from that box and released it into the world for everyone.

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

#364

Post by somenameforme »

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.…

The Chinese domestic market is extremely competitive on most things, including LLMs. Once one top company went open weights there, that's going to put pressure on others to follow suit. It'd be akin to if a company like Anthropic or OpenAI went open-weight, it'd probably result in a domino-effect of more US models going open-weights since otherwise that competitor is going to win a huge chunk of mind/market share for free.

It's also relatively free right now. Few people are going to run local models, and in the future it's likely that every model being released today will be obsolete. The only real downside is ease of distillation for competitors, but that's probably impossible to stop anyhow.

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

#365

Post by abe94 »

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.

Its a bit more complicated than that quote implies

At posthog we see if a customer is using an llm, they use more than 1 model. The typical pattern is frontier models for a small percentage of 'harder' tasks and then one of these chinese models for more standardized procedures. As you get better at standardizing procedures you are able to use the chinese models for more and more work so token usage goes up, but the $ spend on top models has still been growing

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

#366

Post by jmward01 »

tclancy wrote: post #334
jmward01 wrote: post #312

So, I've been working on infinite context models (think fixed size state with a few tricks) and I think this will eventually lead to a kind of lock-in by vendor. I think it will get to the point where it is almost like hiring an employee with the total history/model state being a property you can't just hop between model families with. Clearly open weights still allow you to do this if you have access to that state b…

How are you storing the data that it can't be exported? Or that I can't use an interface or proxy that logs all my conversations locally for import?

It isn't about storing the data you send/receive. It is about having a model live through millions, or billions, of tokens doing the job. The current state becomes very important. Especially when you think about how interacting with these things works. No system prompts, just keep working with it until it is good at its job and then using that state as a starting point for other jobs. picking a bunch of different states as starting points, etc etc. You didn't use a simple system prompt to get there, you used interaction and examples and just like a person you decided they were good enough at some point and let them start doing the job for real. It is a totally different system than current models use.

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

#367

Post by dreambuffer »

andsoitis wrote: post #349
Avicebron wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't most of the economy riding on the stock of these handful of companies though?

> Isn't most of the economy riding on the stock of these handful of companies though? No.

Well, yes, because the US government has staked the future of the country's GDP on AI. They're even divesting from science as a whole and putting it into data centers.

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

#368

Post by wolttam »

SimianSci wrote: post #362
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.…

With their models being open-weight, any two-bit firm in the world with enough capital to invest in a few servers can become a provider capable of carving out their own little niche in the economy. The Chinese see this as a lift on the entire economy, as it comodotizes the technology to a degree in which many firms can serve many sectors of the economy, a true total-economic win worth the public investment. The Ameri…

The U.S. model is honestly more baffling to me, if the goal is broad economic growth.

But it hasn’t seemed like the U.S. powers have been interested in broad growth for quite a long time now. Just whatever can line their own pockets.

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

#370

Post by jrflo »

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?

Right, this is the classic VC playbook and people should really know better. They use capital to undercut competitors on cost to gain market share, then slowly crank up the costs until they are (hopefully) profitable. It makes 0 sense long-term to spend tens of millions on training a frontier model and releasing it for free for someone else to host on their GPUs. It is naive to believe that when the capital starts to dry up and the VCs are looking for a profit that the models will continue to remain open-weight.

Chinese labs are a bit different since they are somewhat state-funded, so I'd expect them to shift to a model where Chinese models are hosted on Chinese infra.

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