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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

#411

Post by cyanydeez »

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 building thigns with open models: 128GB AMD 395+; expensive 72GB blackwell; old NVIDIA 48+48GB; cards.

If it weren't for the massive memory cartel of OpenAI/Anthropic et al, both Mac and AMD would be selling these things.

I repeat, the models are building, modifying and deploying almost anything on github.

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

#412

Post by switchbak »

cyanydeez wrote: post #405
xandrius wrote: post #363

Earlier 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.

Whats even funnier is the attempt to restrict the hardware capabilities of Chinese models inevitably helped them (Because we know they're just as smart, if not smarter, than the staff in America) create smaller and leaner but just as capable models. That's why we now have upper-consumer models fitting on 24GB that can build, manage medium sized git repos. I've yet to find a git repo I can't throw at the Qwen3.6 35B a…

Human ingenuity thrives on constraints.

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

#413

Post by janalsncm »

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.

I would argue your logic is exactly backwards. For most Americans, sharing data with the Chinese government is irrelevant. The CCP cannot put you in jail.

However, American providers are going to be subject to secret national security letters, FISA court warrants, and regular court orders.

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

#414

Post by cyanydeez »

switchbak wrote: post #412
cyanydeez wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whats even funnier is the attempt to restrict the hardware capabilities of Chinese models inevitably helped them (Because we know they're just as smart, if not smarter, than the staff in America) create smaller and leaner but just as capable models. That's why we now have upper-consumer models fitting on 24GB that can build, manage medium sized git repos. I've yet to find a git repo I can't throw at the Qwen3.6 35B a…

Human ingenuity thrives on constraints.

Human sloth thrives on no constraints.

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

#415

Post by azinman2 »

pixl97 wrote: post #402
api wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Stop pilfering what I rightfully stole!"

It’s in the same neighborhood but isn’t really apples to apples. Distilling LLMs is to take a synthesized result that comes from huge amounts of innovation and computation, while the other is scraping what already exists as is. It is fair to say you stole our multi-billion dollar intellectual output in that scenario.

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

#416

Post by sajithdilshan »

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…

Another important thing that made software usage and education available for most of the world was piracy. I remember as a kid growing up in a developing country, any software (windows, office, Visual Basic, flash, dreamweaver, etc.) was less than 1$. That allowed me to try out and learn so many things on my own without paying a huge amount of money for the license. And I think this is true for most of the software developers of my generation who grew up in developing countries

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

#417

Post by lambda »

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…

> 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

10-15 years? The current rate is closer to 10-15 months.

15 months ago, the top model on the Artificial Analysis index was GPT-o3. It scores 30 on the Artificial Analysis index.

Today, you can easily run Qwen 3.6 27B on a variety of consumer hardware. It scores 37 on that index.

Here are a number of open weights models that you can run locally compared with the frontier class models from 7 to 15 months ago: https://artificialanalysis.ai/?models=o3%2Co3-pro%2Cclaude-4...

I've run all of these models on my laptop (Strix Halo, 128 GiB of unified RAM); the bigger ones, like MiniMax M2.7 and DeepSeek V4 Flash, need to be done at fairly aggressive quants that will certainly lose some performance and not quite hit the performance of the unquantized models. But still, it's definitely the case that you can run models that are competitive with the frontier models of 10-15 months ago on consumer laptops.

Heck, just announced though the weights haven't yet been released for independent confirmation is MiniCPM5-2B, a 2 billion parameter (small enough to run on your phone) model, that according to their benchmarks has performance competitive with GPT-4o, a frontier class model from 2024.

https://nitter.net/i/status/2079088670804767114

So that's around 1 year for frontier to consumer device class, 2 years from frontier to phone.

Now, this kind of rate won't necessarily keep up; it's possible that local models will hit a performance ceiling before frontier models do. There's only so much information you can cram into a certain number of bytes, and the AI boom is causing hardware prices to skyrocket so keeping consumer hardware from advancing quite as fast as it had been.

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

#418

Post by meteor333 »

I think people are missing the point here. AI's large win is in Enterprise and B2B. Especially in US, enterprises are not going to adopt Chinese models due to the hidden security and the privacy risk. In each wave of model release, Chinese have already proven to beat the performance metrics, but there is no track record of adoption.

Companies do have a huge appetite for open-weight models, but who is going to invest enough to train those models and also prove out a revenue model and ROI with it? Plus, it needs to come from someone with the track record of safety.

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

#419

Post by cosmic_cheese »

As a somewhat naive layman in all of this, for a while now in my mind it's been fairly obvious that the methods of the current big western players in the space weren't sustainable and the cat would be forever out of the bag sooner or later.

Open weights are also just one aspect of this. Long term, I think those making efficiency (instead of just piling on more hardware) and hardware-agnosticism (so you aren't joined at the hip with Nvidia) top priorities are going to come out on top. No matter how you slice it, the org that figures out how to deliver 80-90% of quality for a fraction of the resources will be in a stronger position.

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

#420

Post by elictronic »

wiremine wrote: post #337
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. This assumes a) AI is a zero-sum game, and b) we're actually talking about on-prem AI will replace cloud-based AI. I think neither statements are true. AI is like compute: we'll need all sorts of it, in various sizes, everywhere. I'm sure Nvidia whats to own all the workloads. On t…

It will take about 35 years for digital camera sales to reach Kodaks profit margins. The market growing and companies raising the economy are not zero-sum. Nvidia/Kodak killing the golden goose is zero-sum. When the difference is your valuation crashes that's zero sum for the company, just not for everyone else.

My only concern is if we can limit the economic impact from lowering investments and causing a 40% market collapse circa 2008/9.

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