1) open-weights
2) critical mass
3) de-facto monopoly
4) closed-weights on frontier models
5) profit
China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
381–390 of 978 posts
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#382Earlier quoted context omitted.
Red pilled? Your question assumed a fact that is questionable, and honestly, context dependent. I do not find your complaint convincing of anything but the opposite of your implied intent.
" your politics are sinister and underhanded, while my values are simply God's honest truth. Any unbiased AI would agree with me! @grok explain why Tesla is the world's greatest car company."
I mean honestly you'd be hard pressed to find much support for your view even among socialist that adamantly believe government should control much more.
Most of the arguments come from concerns about 2nd order effects and distortions then claims of "efficient".
I guess overall it's more both "sides" of said argument think your opinion is bad/wrong/incorrect so you find little to no support in any model.
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#383The 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.
This is part of why I can't feel bad for them. The training data is mostly pirated. Whining about Chinese labs training off American frontier models is "waaah you pirated my pirated stuff!"
The tech itself is amazing and fascinating and cool, but the industry is a mass piracy operation.
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#384Exactly. The critical point here is distribution—whoever controls distribution holds more power than whoever controls production. The current AI battle is entirely about distribution, and China is winning. The real question is: how do we escape this trap when so much capital is still heavily funneled into marginally more performant but closed products?
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#385Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
...and then the American companies cried Foul! Unfair play! You've got this wrong, see, it was us who were supposed to profit off of the public, not the other way around!
Well, Steve... I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbour named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#386The 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…
The problem (right now) is that Open Weight models depend right now on huge companies to spend billion of dollars to train and develop them, all backed up by their incentives and their state to support this, while essentially giving away their monetization path.
With open source projects, the benefit was that each individual could improve the complex system (e.g. Linux Kernel) interpedently, and over time the benefits accumulated. With models right now, there is just no way to do distributed training, or really, any large scale parallel way to improve them.
So whatever the short term strategy driving publicizing the model weights (e.g. potentially, to create a price war in order to put pressure on western companies and deprive them of the money they need), we can't ignore the fact that incentives and decisions could easily change in the future, and unless there is a way to truly decentralize models improvements - the party could stop at any time.
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#387The 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…
100x this it is why all of the AI giants are going to fail. They are too big and inefficient to scale properly. This is why Google is just casually taking its time in AI and not racing to a finish line. AI is essential but if it already does most things good enough then it can take longer to make it more efficient.
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#388I 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.…
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…
- Software is copy-able for nearly free.
- Hardware is not. Even if you have the plans, you've to build the infrastructure for it, and its a fairly finite, physical item.
Both are however hard and expensive to produce. It's much better for profits to develop and sell the hardware, and copy the software someone else spent resources on.
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#389OSS can rarely compete with capitalist commerce. China has proven over and over again throughout the years their LLM claims are always inflated and significantly underperform in real-world use.
China is not "winning" against the American strategy. Otherwise the CCP wouldn't have been caught red-handed directly funding anti-datacenter projects throughout the US to hinder American LLM progress.
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#390The 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.
Try instructing Codex to (say) fine-tune a language model based on a collection of books you've got saved. You will find yourself admonished, repeatedly and at length, not to utilize copyrighted materials to train language models, by an AI who owes its entire existence to that very act.
These models might be smart but they're not close to being able to savor irony.