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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

#441

Post by overgard »

chasd00 wrote: post #298
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 sort of baffled by what the entities that train the open-weights models get out of it though if you do the training then you're in control of the output. For example, recommending your products/services or failing to mention your competitors. You could also automatically introduce backdoors into code deemed interesting, i'm sure all governments are very interested in having that influence.

That seems hypothetically possible, but kind of hard to do? I don't know a lot about training, but it seems like they wouldn't have exact control of the data that goes in at that scale (scraping the internet) so it seems like it would be kind of hard to do that in a way that's subtle. I'm kind of reminded of Elon Musk trying to put his political views into Grok and it seemed like it created huge technical problems with the model saying some really out of control things. Maybe it was just an xAI issue though.

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

#442

Post by dinfinity »

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…

> 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.

Imagine approaching fundamental scientific research like that. "Welp, it can't make money, so it won't happen."

There is more to society than capitalism.

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

#443

Post by drstewart »

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 Chinese strategy is to fool naive westerners into thinking that's their strategy (looks like its working), until they can buy time to do the American strategy.

Hence, buying up and closing up foreign competition then whining about it when it's blocked: https://www.dw.com/en/china-firm-seeks-damages-over-state-co...

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

#445

Post by overgard »

bluegatty wrote: post #338
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.…

'Libre Office' did not 'win'. People are happy to pay $50/year per seat to have the extra features and to not have to deal with stuff. There's an issue at the margins here: $1000/employee is a massive cost - it has to be deeply justified. $50/employee is like ... $2 out of your pocket. It's an incremental cost. The CFO is happy to pay it if there is a lot of value. A lot of software is in that later category. Imagine…

> 'Libre Office' did not 'win'.

I think France and other parts of the EU are switching over to it. Although that's probably more due to Microsoft's aggressive behavior recently. Agree on the cost thing generally, but I can't help but think that when the hype to "do AI" blows over, people are going to be casting a jaundiced eye towards data security, which probably means self-hosting and sandboxing

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

#446

Post by elictronic »

maxerickson wrote: post #408
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.

Their data center business is selling gpus. They wrap them in a complete platform, but that's what they are selling. They do report it separately from consumer and business sales of gpus used in PCs.

The data center business is selling Tensor core GPU's which are used for Large language models nearly exclusively. I don't think of them as GPU's anymore considering a GPU is a graphics processing unit and this is not the primary function of those cards anymore. A GPU will always be a card you put in your computer to play a game in my mind.

I know a tomato is a fruit but will still be annoyed when someone is pedantic about it because that's dumb.

When the mobile phone is eventually integrated into the human body or some other silly application in the future that will annoy me as well. Congrats on being pedantic.

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

#447

Post by azinman2 »

lelanthran wrote: post #436
azinman2 wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. Hang on, why is scraping the public pool of knowledge not taking "a synthesized result that comes from huge amounts of innovation and computation"? You think that that all those github repos…

The Chinese models are the result of just as many papers, GitHub repos, etc… AND the synthesized results of those.

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

#448

Post by LaurensBER »

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.

People overestimate what can happen in a year and underestimate what can happen in 5.

I'm betting that increased model efficiency and hardware optimisations will get us there a lot sooner. Biggest hurdle would be the memory prices though, if those do not drop back down it might take 15.

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

#449

Post by jonahx »

dinfinity wrote: post #442
gpt5 wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Imagine approaching fundamental scientific research like that. "Welp, it can't make money, so it won't happen." There is more to society than capitalism.

> Imagine approaching fundamental scientific research like that. "Welp, it can't make money, so it won't happen."

> There is more to society than capitalism.

I don't read GP like that. I read it as "we should recognize a situation of unstable incentives for an important outcome, and start thinking about other solutions."

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

#450

Post by jdkee »

ciupicri wrote: post #430
azinman2 wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can't steal intellectual property, only infringe on the copyright holder.
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