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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

#551

Post by rurp »

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…

Software being open source has many strong positive externalities. It advances human knowledge and freedom. If you don't think that counts as a moral good then I'm baffled by what you think a moral good is.

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

#552

Post by awllau »

apparent wrote: post #163
tyleo wrote: post #6

I’m suspicious of some quotes here, “80% of startups using Chinese models,” doesn’t seem quite right to me. I just interviewed at several startups and they were all using the US models. Maybe they have some minor use of Chinese models but the bread-and-butter of most of these businesses model use is the Claude and Codex subscriptions.

The full quote: > When entrepreneurs walk into the offices of Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), a big American venture-capital firm, the odds these days are that their startups are using AI models made in China. “I’d say 80% chance [they are] using a Chinese open-source model,” says Martin Casado, a partner at a16z. This is very different from what the author portrays. It may be the case that many pre-funded startups are u…

Casado says he was misquoted and walked this back: https://x.com/martin_casado/status/1990462245541982546

"Well, not quite. I'd say 20-30% use open source. Of those I'd say 80% use Chinese based models. So closer to 16-24%."

Reads pretty differently.

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

#553

Post by mananaysiempre »

ralfd wrote: post #480
jbm wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a little radicalized when ChatGPT literally refused to translate parts of 1000+ year old religious texts and told me it was due to copyright concerns.

Cant you in this case point out that obviously it is an old twxt and there is no copyright?

I once tried to ask it for an example of a particular twisty situation in Latin grammar, and try what I might it kept hallucinating false citations while ignoring my instructions for longer quotes that would likely have prevented the problem. But I guess avoiding lawsuits from the estates of Cicero and Livy is more important.

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

#554

Post by vrganj »

azinman2 wrote: post #447
lelanthran wrote: post #436

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. 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.

Yeah real convenient that the line would be exactly after pilfering all of human knowledge work, but before American model providers.

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

#555

Post by ben_w »

zer00eyz wrote: post #494
bijowo1676 wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in case of chatgpt/anthropic, the LLM model simply represents the hypocrisy of their owners

You miss spelled the word stupidity. Anthropic is, in particular, bent about safety. The problem is they are concerned about yesterday's threats. The models that are out, and can be run locally, already open a pandoras box of concerns that we will never be able to put back.

It's much easier to focus on yesterday's threats than tomorrow's. A drunk looking under a lampost because that's where the light is, even though the keys were lost somewhere else.

That said, the AI companies are one of the few places where they take future concerns so seriously, that they entertain concerns most people observing them think are head-in-the-clouds-sci-fi-levels-of-delusional, e.g. "what goes wrong if it works?"

This does not make them correct about the threats of tomorrow. Prediction is hard, especially about the future.

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

#556

Post by ericmay »

rurp wrote: post #551
ericmay wrote: post #404

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. 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…

Software being open source has many strong positive externalities. It advances human knowledge and freedom. If you don't think that counts as a moral good then I'm baffled by what you think a moral good is.

It depends on how it is applied. You can release open source software that advances knowledge and freedom that results in economic destruction or the loss of life, for example.

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

#557

Post by zer00eyz »

subarctic wrote: post #519
zer00eyz wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You miss spelled the word stupidity. Anthropic is, in particular, bent about safety. The problem is they are concerned about yesterday's threats. The models that are out, and can be run locally, already open a pandoras box of concerns that we will never be able to put back.

Maybe what they're actually worried about is liability, not safety?

https://tornyol.com - A ycombinator company just killed its first bug: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/drones/autonomous...

Ukraine admits to making autonomous kills on people 2 years ago: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2529849-fully-autonomou...

Slaughterbots Sci Fi short was 6 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmU

Today this is buildable, many models will happily help you glue everything you need together to make swapping in a new version of YOLO to track humans viable.

AI researches are out there worrying about the paper clip problem, about the singularity, about cyber security, about bio weapons, and drug manufacturing.

None of them are thinking about forward looking threat actor models.

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

#558

Post by rlt »

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…

> free and low-end eventually wins

Apple, the world's second most valuable company, seems like a counterexample.

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

#559

Post by apparent »

awllau wrote: post #552
apparent wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The full quote: > When entrepreneurs walk into the offices of Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), a big American venture-capital firm, the odds these days are that their startups are using AI models made in China. “I’d say 80% chance [they are] using a Chinese open-source model,” says Martin Casado, a partner at a16z. This is very different from what the author portrays. It may be the case that many pre-funded startups are u…

Casado says he was misquoted and walked this back: https://x.com/martin_casado/status/1990462245541982546 "Well, not quite. I'd say 20-30% use open source. Of those I'd say 80% use Chinese based models. So closer to 16-24%." Reads pretty differently.

Wow, that kind of undermines the entire premise of the piece. It also makes much more sense. Thanks for digging that up!

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

#560

Post by calebkaiser »

_fizz_buzz_ wrote: post #452
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.

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?

OpenAI's Head of Strategic Futures just this week posted this about the latest Kimi release: "It's a very good model! I don't think its performance can be explained away by distillation or anything like that."

It was part of a longer post that kicked off quite a firestorm about open models and OpenAI's position on them, but it's also notable that labs are no longer contending that open models are essentially just distilled versions of frontier models: https://x.com/deanwball/status/2078133895766114412

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