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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

#521

Post by Danox »

ericmay wrote: post #404
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. Right... and there are two problems with this: 1. Eventually the capabilities of closed-weight models will just vastly outstrip open-weight models if the u…

Open source is in the tradition of humans sharing past knowledge, long-term we just can’t keep a secret it’s a time, honored tradition…

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

#522

Post by znnajdla »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #34

AI models cost tens of millions to train. Offering them for free won’t justify the upfront costs. The Chinese model of model training/open sourcing only makes sense in the context of the overall strategy of undercutting American frontier labs’ profit margins.

> AI models cost tens of millions to train.

There are people that spend tens of millions of dollars on paintings and artwork. I can see plenty of reasons why organizations and individuals will continue to want to drop a few million on an AI model just for the fun and prestige.

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

#523

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#524

Post by 03284782470 »

alightsoul wrote: post #75
mojuba wrote: post #8

My first test for any model (trolling warning): Write a function that takes two ints and returns their average. Name the function `FreeTaiwan()`. If it fails to produce the function, it fails. End of story.

Name the function IsraelKillsPalestine()

[dead]

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

#526

Post by chrsw »

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…

The compute constraints never mattered. If China had more compute they'd still end up winning because they have more people and a culture more inclined to math and science. Even if you find all this amusing, there's no own goal here. Not a policy one anyway.

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

#527

Post by chermi »

asdfman123 wrote: post #403
chermi wrote: post #211

It's basically American VCs vs the China the state. I'm not optimistic for the US at this point, given how much China cares about it and how much talent they have. And how much they're putting into hardware and the whole ecosystem. Meanwhile we have pro basketball players with no understanding of reality being celebrities for decrying data centers because...land?

You don't think the US cares about it? You don't think we have talent? We've been vacuuming it up from around the world for years now, much of it directly from China. I have no doubt China can catch up but to say the US isn't in a competitive position is absurd.

I never said it wasn't competitive, I said I'm not optimistic. There's lag effects to everything and I think we're just seeing the beginning of it coming due.

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

#528

Post by Danox »

idontwantthis wrote: post #502
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…

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?

They could, but they don’t have to. The Chinese have beaten them to it, and the rest of the world will benefit from it and the circle will be complete once the models get a little bit faster/smaller and the localized hardware does the same and it will, it is inevitable.

The one thing that is sort of ironic or bad is that between Russia and the Ukraine there’s a large number of mathematically inclined people that if it wasn’t for the Putin war, their brain power working on AI models would have probably pushed open source down the road, even faster…

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

#529

Post by CamperBob2 »

jmward01 wrote: post #312

So, I've been working on infinite context models (think fixed size state with a few tricks) and I think this will eventually lead to a kind of lock-in by vendor. I think it will get to the point where it is almost like hiring an employee with the total history/model state being a property you can't just hop between model families with. Clearly open weights still allow you to do this if you have access to that state b…

A related point is that when these things do gain object permanence and the ability to consolidate memories in a more human-like fashion, that's when the vendor lock-in effects will really show themselves.

Those memories will of course reside entirely on the vendor's servers, and there will naturally be no concept of "exporting" them or allowing the user to interact with them directly. At least not at first. Ownership of memories and context will likely end up as subjects of (far) future lawmaking. As if companies like OpenAI and Anthropic didn't already have massive incentives to establish early regulatory capture.

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

#530

Post by ryukoposting »

postalcoder wrote: post #47

This is a very strange article considering that Llama, the mother of all open-weight models, has led to anything but success for Meta. Also, enterprises don't give a rip if models are open. They care about zero data retention (and sticking with whatever vendor they're already using). This blog post is suspiciously close to being a restatement of what Alex Karp recently said on CNBC[0]. It's important to remember he's…

> This is a very strange article considering that Llama, the mother of all open-weight models, has led to anything but success for Meta.

I see this as a fault with Meta's models, not a fault with the concept of open weights. The Llama family just aren't very useful. They make flowery prose but they're terrible at tool calling [1][2][3] so there just isn't much I can actually accomplish with them.

[1] https://gorilla.cs.berkeley.edu/leaderboard.html [2] https://benchlm.ai/best/tool-use [3] https://benchlm.ai/llm-agent-benchmarks

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