Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning

werd.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 978 posts

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

#421

Post by stackghost »

nickysielicki wrote: post #260
stackghost wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every school kid in the USA, you mean? Because I think other countries would rightly perceive the world you described as a dystopia. I don't want my kids' education to be surrendered to the whims of Big Tech douchebags any more than I want AI decisions in legal cases or an AI replacement for a family doctor. Some systems are better left mostly analog. Education is one of them.

Your kids education was already surrendered to the whims of the Big Textbook Politburo. History textbooks are full of propaganda. I think what we have today and what we grew up with is 10x more dystopian.

Textbooks, especially in the early years, are a minor part of education.

I want them to have an actual human teacher.

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

#422

Post by azinman2 »

resters wrote: post #394
SimianSci wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 allocatio…

Don’t forget it took that huge spend to publish the papers and get to the models we have. It’s not obvious that without them we’d have LLMs springing up out of China or anywhere else.

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

#423

Post by Forgeties79 »

lambda wrote: post #417
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…

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

The leaps between models have gotten smaller and smaller. 2023-2024 models were rocketing up in quality. 2024-2025 I’d say was pretty impressive too. But 2025-2026? Very easy to feel the slowing pace of improvement. I agree 10-15 years is overly conservative but 10-15mo is far too bullish.

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

#424

Post by Glyptodon »

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 this is all true, but that unlike with Moore's law and improved PC tooling and capabilities, we also have essentially existing biological evidence that there should be a way to create much better intelligent systems in terms of training, memory, and efficiency. With classic PC evolution we didn't even have that evidence but still could make a relatively strong inference (Moore's law). But here we basically have evidence that there can be something much improved and know that it's only going to take research and discovery to figure it out, not new hardware processes.

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

#425

Post by elictronic »

ak_111 wrote: post #357
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.

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'…

Thanks generic LLM model response. Please upgrade to a higher tier model if you are going to waste our time.

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

#426

Post by brap »

danielciocirlan wrote: post #393

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 t…

I bet that, all things considered, training 10 new Chinese frontier models costs _significantly_ less than a single modern fighter jet.

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

#427

Post by kmaitreys »

raincole wrote: post #401
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…

Except cloud services won over local-first apps. > Put all of these trends together, and I think that in 10-15 years, we are going to have consumer PCs (and phones!) doing I'm not even sure in 10-15 years whether we're still going to have consumer PCs, or PCs at all.

I have similar thoughts.

To those who feel on the contrary, I would genuinely like to understand why average consumer won't be priced out of hardware? The silicon industry is already quite centralised. Everywhere we already see the concept of ownership disappearing.

It's quite difficult for me to visualise a non-dystopian future where our PCs are just mere screens and every compute happens on a remote cloud, owned by some corporation, charging you subscription fees to even add and multiply numbers.

I would be the happiest if this (perhaps the most) pessimistic scenario doesn't pan out, but I can't deny that it feels like that's where we are heading.

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

#428

Post by Onavo »

hyperbovine wrote: post #390
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.

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.

This behavior is actually specific to ChatGPT because they lost a music copyright lawsuit in Germany. They would refuse to output music lyrics too but they would happily do analysis on lyrics if you supply them. I suspect there might be a guardrail model involved here.

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

#429

Post by paulddraper »

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 obvious counterpoint: Apple captured the majority of the US smartphone market.

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

#430

Post by ciupicri »

azinman2 wrote: post #415
pixl97 wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

You could say that both of them stole, but different stuff.
Post reply on HN