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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

#501

Post by matthewdgreen »

janalsncm wrote: post #308
elictronic wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China wants the US economy to flounder. Building our entire growth model on software that can be copied and taken by a small group of people will have no possible consequences.

> China wants the US economy to flounder It’s not that simple. If the US economy goes into a recession, it will take large sectors of the weak Chinese economy with it either directly or indirectly. It’s probably more accurate to say they don’t want American LLMs to become dominant. The huge US data center build out doesn’t depend on Anthropic and OpenAI anyways. Those data centers can just as easily serve Qwen or GLM…

They can't do this at the same margins. Cloud compute traditionally has <= 30% margins, and that's the very generous profit margin that folks like AWS are able to squeeze out of it with lock-in and proprietary tooling (something that will probably go away as software becomes more commoditized.) Frontier model companies (e.g., SpaceX) have been promising profit margins in the 75%+ range.

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

#502

Post by idontwantthis »

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…

I am also confused by this point. The American government could force OpenAI and Anthropic to open their models, but then they would instantly evaporate, right? It doesn't seem like a choice that they can make, so framing it as a "winning" strategy doesn't make any sense to me. In what world could those companies have existed and opened their models?

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

#503

Post by kshacker »

Onavo wrote: post #428
hyperbovine wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So at the end of it, if we win enough lawsuits to demarcate some knowledge out of bounds, sufficient enough to make a difference, I wonder how that will affect the AI. Make it dumber because it does not have that data, it make it smarter since it will need to reason better with smaller knowledge base.

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

#504

Post by mrinterweb »

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.…

Undercutting US dominance in AI is huge for China. If the entire narrative is that you have to use Anthropic or OpenAI to access a decent model, then China's AI labs are sitting on the sidelines as some third rate solutions. China publishing the model weights of models comparable to the frontier proprietary models drastically undercuts closed labs dominance. Maybe these Chinese AI labs don't have the billions infrastructures some of the US players do, but they don't have to if the model is open weight. Many inference provider companies around the world have hardware that can run these models and they will happily run frontier class models for people. Starting in 7 days, people will have the option of which of many providers they want to use to access K3.

Making frontier grade models a commodity will make a competitive market where companies compete for business by improving their quality and decreasing their prices. The cost to access frontier grade models will continue be driven down the more competition that enters the market. This commoditization will challenge the valuations of Anthropic and OpenAI.

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

#505

Post by jeffreyrogers »

ilovecake1984 wrote: post #498
jeffreyrogers wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> free and low-end eventually wins Not in SaaS which is what LLMs are. You can get VMs for much cheaper than AWS, Microsoft, and Google offer them but large companies (and startups) are happy to pay a premium for the support, reputation, and reliability that they perceive those companies as offering. Same thing for some of the managed database providers who are effectively selling a very heavily marked up version of…

There will always be a space for perforce in a world of git. Doesn’t mean perforce is worth trillions.

That's not really my argument. It's that companies seem happy to pay a premium for a large company to provide complicated software services to them even when there are cheaper competitors.

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

#506

Post by znnajdla »

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.

Why is it so baffling that people want to build great things? There are plenty of people who are happy building things for a salary and have no interest in taking over the world. Do you find the whole world of open source software baffling? Linus Torvalds and Richard Hipp and Antirez created the world’s most prolific software products and released it for free.

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

#507

Post by digitaltrees »

atishay811 wrote: post #292
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.…

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…

America was the factory of the world before and England before that. The temptation of “moving upstream” is irresistible.

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

#508

Post by Paradigma11 »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #73
jvanderbot wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you believe in some kind of competition-free objective set of market morals, then yes, this is a strange contradiction. If you believe that humans are locked in a productive struggle against each other at the organizational level, and that the knife-edge balance is a feature, not a bug, then it's not so weird to think about. It is simultaneously true that it is in my best interest for prices to sink (as a consumer…

Oh I don't think it's either of those things, I think it's good old fashioned Racism/Xenophobia. We did the same shit to Japan and Korea when they were coming up out of their respective post-war periods, and we still do, to a degree. With China's ruling party also being "communist" (in massive, massive air-quotes) it also lets political actors dust off the McCarthyism to boot. This is, to be clear, not meant as a rin…

China lost tons of goodwill through its https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_warrior_diplomacy

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

#509

Post by citizenpaul »

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.

I live in SV. When I was at the grocery store last year I overheard a group of lawyers talking about their progress on litigation against AI companies and how they need more SWE help to progress.

I'd say that they have valid concerns about being cagey on the copyright stuff despite the obvious hypocrisy of it.

Stealing IP is effectively legal in China so they don't really have the same concerns.

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

#510

Post by Danox »

realusername wrote: post #467
_fizz_buzz_ wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, OpenAI and Anthropic say the Chinese models are only as good because they distill their models. How true is that. I am sure it adds something. But is it more like a marginal 1% improvement or something really significant?

I also don't believe it, if it was as easy as that, we would have hundreds of competitors. The truth that Anthropic and OpenAI will not say, is that these Chinese labs have a lot of talented people.

Very true, and once the models get even better and smaller and operate locally at a reasonable level there will be even more smart people particularly young people that will get access. The fun has only just started. Like the dawn of the personal computer era.
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