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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

#391

Post by asdfman123 »

cheriot wrote: post #372

What's the incentive for the Chinese labs to continue releasing weights 5 years from now? In the short term it attracts talent and builds brand, but they make little money on inference to support research and training costs. Tin foil hat thinking: it also pulls inference revenue away from Antropic/OpenAI and a financial crises at those organizations improves the relative position of Chinese labs. Is there a reason to…

> Tin foil hat warning: it also pulls inference revenue away from the Antropic/OpenAI and a financial crises at those organizations improves the relative position of Chinese labs

How is that a "tin foil hat" argument? That's how competition works. You want to make your competitors stumble and fall.

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

#392

Post by andsoitis »

dreambuffer wrote: post #367
andsoitis wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Saying that AI will drive the future GDP is a very different thing from saying an economy relies on the stock price of a few AI companies.

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

#393

Post by danielciocirlan »

Is China’s strategy sustainable, given the enormous costs of training frontier models?

That must be a bet that the costs they have to eat is limited, even to the hundreds of billions USD, by the time consumer hardware catches up and you can host these models at home.

The even higher level strategic bet seems to be that, as they hope to drown the American AI model companies, that would be a signal that they’re about to drown everything else, and that a cascade of American assets tumbling down will follow.

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

#394

Post by resters »

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…

While I completely agree with your take, I think everyone has been surprised by how quickly LLMs have become highly useful and extremely powerful, and by how possible it is for relatively smaller models to also be highly useful.

Given that, I would expect that in hindsight OpenAI and Anthropic would spend 40% of what they have on compute if starting over and knowing the actual landscape.

The massive capital allocation was a blind decision and they swung big.

It is still possible that techniques will be developed that create a moat where the massive hardware capex is justified, but US policies of banning competitive GPUs and blocking frontier lab releases makes such things far less likely.

"Escape velocity" for AI is when the open weight models are good enough to help drive the next frontier innovations/techniques. I think we are close to that if not already there, at which point it's a race to commoditization no matter what Altman or Lutnik wish will happen.

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

#395

Post by fridder »

bee_rider wrote: post #314
elictronic wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wonder what the thinking inside NVIDIA is at the moment. They have countless examples to learn from here, about the danger of not being willing to cannibalize your high end products. But, of course, there’s a reason that there are lots of examples of this sort of failure. There’s plenty of competition that would be happy to attack them from below, though…

I also wonder what this moment will mean for chip design going forward. The fact that we are so constrained on the GPU side along with the success of unified memory with apple silicon does make me wonder what chips in 3-5 years will look like.

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

#396

Post by furyofantares »

kirtivr wrote: post #164
furyofantares wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There very little reason to use OpenRouter to access closed models, instead of just using the provider directly.

One big reason I can think of is to avoid vendor lock-in. This is why most enterprises use a multi-cloud setup, despite the increased complexity.

If you're only using the frontier providers, it's nearly trivial to support switching between the 2-3 of them that exist without using OpenRouter.

If you are ALSO routing to open-weights models on OpenRouter, then sure. But what we've come back to is that almost everyone using OpenRouter is someone who wants to use open-weights models, and some of them also want to use closed models, so of course open models take all the top spots.

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

#397

Post by yogthos »

gpt5 wrote: post #386
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…

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 benefit…

This is precisely why we need more projects like this https://github.com/bigscience-workshop/petals

There's no fundamental reason why models couldn't be developed and trained using community efforts. It might not be as fast and efficient, but it's definitely possible.

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

#398

Post by elictronic »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #371
elictronic wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. You mean they resisted the idea trying to protect their legacy business, and it ended up all but killing them?

They resisted the idea because it did kill their legacy business. Kodaks peak was 16 billion in revenue in 1996. The digital camera market will be approaching that level of value inflation adjusted around 2030.

35 years to get back to status quo. Putting a bullet in a golden goose is often considered a bad idea. Everyone is happy they are dead, but if you can't understand why they might try to keep the corpse alive you have never looked at the numbers.

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

#399

Post by Gareth321 »

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…

> 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.

At current pace, we'll have open weight LLMs with frontier intelligence in 6-12 months. The constraint is RAM - both for the model and the context. It's likely that distillation and quantisation and TurboQuant will significantly reduce RAM requirements. I think we'll have Opus 4.8-like performance on 64GB of RAM in two years.

Of course, by then, frontier intelligence will be god-like.

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

#400

Post by asdfman123 »

hintymad wrote: post #325

I wonder how Chinese companies can make their models so much cheaper than the US companies. I'm not sure government subsidies are the answer. Subsidizing a single company with a few billion dollars, maybe. Subsidizing at least three companies with 10s of billions of dollars annually? Do we have proof of that? I assume we can't pin it on the lower cost of engineers in China, either. The top engineers are not that chea…

Because that's the only way they win right now.

In the US, why make a scrappy small model when a big tech company will pay you a stupid salary for working on their big one?

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